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jennifer's reviews
173 reviews
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
4.0
I loved Cabaret and I loved the book it was based on just as much. Seeing that I loved the film A Single Man, it looks like I need to go read that too. I am now an official fan of Herr Issyvoo.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
5.0
What can I say? Having both read Oranges and seen a BBC documentary about her earlier this year, I have now essentially consumed the same story three times. And I would happily do it again if she writes another version. So happy to have discovered, amongst other things, a female Alan Bennett.
Is It Just Me? by Miranda Hart
4.0
Bought this at Heathrow because I am incapable of passing up a "buy one get one 1/2 off" deal at WH Smith and because Miranda's TV show is one of the few things that makes me laugh out loud. Felt slightly guilty for reading this instead of a "real" writer, like Jeanette Winterson, whose Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal I was already in the midst of reading at time of the Miranda purchase. (Incidentally, having just finished both books, I can report that Miranda's book could have just as easily been titled Why Be Normal When You Can Be Happy. They are rather nice, if odd, companion pieces.)
Anyway, it only took me to Chapter Two to realize I was going to like this book, and that comedy writing is as "real" as any other type:
[Miranda talking to her younger self] "...you'll settle for ironic dancing, which is really where you just dance to the finale of Grease, enthusiastically and badly, to whatever music is playing."
Yep, that's me.
Anyway, it only took me to Chapter Two to realize I was going to like this book, and that comedy writing is as "real" as any other type:
[Miranda talking to her younger self] "...you'll settle for ironic dancing, which is really where you just dance to the finale of Grease, enthusiastically and badly, to whatever music is playing."
Yep, that's me.
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
5.0
Perfect length for my flight from Seattle to L.A., except for the fact that it made me sob most of the journey. (Unfortunately it appears to only be acceptable for infants to cry on planes, although the stewardess did offer me a complimentary drink.) The book is about the death of Didion's only daughter, but I found the meditations on her own aging and declining health equally moving.
Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls by David Sedaris
5.0
One of the funniest things I've read this summer. My favorite essay in the book is Attaboy, in which Sedaris ponders the madness of modern parenting. He skewers everything from the penchant for presidentially-named toddlers to the way children today can apparently do no wrong. When the piece veers down the path to the good old days of when he was a kid, Sedaris draws a stark contrast to the toddler-tyrant-run homes of today, writing of his own parents, "They did not live in a children's house. We lived in theirs." In other words, he articulates what every sane person has thought when subjected to, say, watching a mother ask her three-year-old if he or she would like a skim milk or 2% babyccino as you stand behind them in a five-person deep line at Starbucks while running progressively later for work.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman
5.0
Adelle Waldman deserves five stars for The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. on the strength alone of her use of someone's reaction to Proust to so succinctly describe them. Here the target is one of the protagonist's former girlfriends, a semi-sickeningly wholesome type: "At home, he'd read Kristen bits from Proust, and she'd get this pinched look on her face, as if the sheer extravagance of Proust's prose was morally objectionable, as if there were children in Africa who could have better used those excess words."
I did, however, think briefly about giving the book a lower rating, mostly because I didn't altogether care for the main character, Nate. At times I envied him, with his intellect and his assured pursuit of writing. I even related to him, as was the occasion when I read this and thought of my own husband and his flair for the dramatic: "...it was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison." But still, I didn't particularly like Nate.
Of course to punish the writer for this is unfair. Her job is, after all, not to make me feel good, but to make me feel. This she does skillfully, also creating what seemed to me a perfectly authentic, if insular world of an early thirty-something, terribly serious writer in Brooklyn.
I did, however, think briefly about giving the book a lower rating, mostly because I didn't altogether care for the main character, Nate. At times I envied him, with his intellect and his assured pursuit of writing. I even related to him, as was the occasion when I read this and thought of my own husband and his flair for the dramatic: "...it was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison." But still, I didn't particularly like Nate.
Of course to punish the writer for this is unfair. Her job is, after all, not to make me feel good, but to make me feel. This she does skillfully, also creating what seemed to me a perfectly authentic, if insular world of an early thirty-something, terribly serious writer in Brooklyn.