Recently Read

As usual, skip this if you wanna.  I feel like a lot of my posts are getting skipped, lately, so I figured I might's well throw this one in here.  Ha.

1.  Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess.  Memoir.  If you read her blog (and who doesn't?), you're familiar with her writing style, and this book is a series of blog-post-like vignettes.  Entertaining.

2.  A Hundred Summers by Beatriz Williams.  Novel set in the thirties about a woman, her best friend, and their romantic entanglements with the same man.  Eh, they all acted like a bunch of dipsh*ts, but it was a fairly entertaining read.

3.  One Step at a Time by Elena J. Hanuse - Oh, I am a sucker for walk-across-America books.  But this lady had her hubs follow her in an RV, so she could sleep in a bed every night.  Totally understandable, but not quite in the spirit of the genre.

4.  Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King - It's unusual to read a King book with no scary woo-woo stuff in it.  This is basically a police procedural novel.  I usually like the characters' back-stories as much as, or more than, the main plot in his books, and sadly, this book was lacking in that regard.  At "only" 400 pages, short for him, I got the feeling that maybe an editor took a good chunk out of this one.  Still a good read, if not one of his best.  Looking forward to reading his next one, Revival.

5.  Good-Bye, Boise ... Hello, Alaska by Cora Holmes.  Nonfiction account of a family living on a remote Alaskan island.  Very interesting.

6.  Movie Time!  Dallas Buyers Club is about a dude with AIDS in Texas in the early eighties who goes up against the FDA to provide drugs to fellow AIDS patients.  I really, really do not care for Matthew McConaughey, and that car commercial was just bizarre, but man, he is a good actor.  And Jared Leto was just astonishing as Rayon.

7.  Home to Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani - This author is quite popular, so I thought I'd give it a try.  This book is evidently one in a series, and not the first one.  I couldn't get into it and didn't finish it.

8.  Movie time again!  I saw Into the Woods on Christmas day, the first showing of the morning, and that theater was sold out.  Usually when I go to the movies on  Christmas it's a ghost town, but not this time.  See review here.

9.  Another movie review:  Johnny Got His Gun, from 1971.  An anti-war film which I first became aware of thanks to Metallica's song One  many years ago, this movie is about a severely injured WW1 vet.

10.  Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas.  Memoir about coming of age in Harlem in the 30s and 40s.  Good.



So that's what I've been reading/watching lately.  And you?