Recently Read

1.  Movie time! "The Waiting Room" is a documentary about a hospital emergency waiting room.  Very good.

2.  Okay, now we'll do some books.  I'm Down  by Misha Wolff is a memoir about a poor white girl growing up in a poor black  neighborhood.  Very funny and very good.  A keeper.

3.  Coop by Michael Perry - Memoir about a guy who moves to a hobby farm.  Okay.

4.  Chalktown by Melinda Haynes is a novel about a small Southern town, some of its inhabitants, and a murder.  It could have been interesting, but instead was boring as sh*t.  I finished it, but I'm not sure why I bothered.  yawn.

5.  Crazy Enough  by Storm Large - Memoir by a rock and roll chick who struggled to understand her mentally ill mother.  Good.

6.  Another movie! "We Need to Talk About Kevin".  Da fuq?  I think this was supposed to be a movie about a "bad seed", but I got fifteen minutes in, couldn't make heads or tails out of it, and bailed.  It was like watching some indie producer's fever-dream.  Sorry, can't review, didn't make it to the half-hour mark.

 7.  The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield - Novel about a preacher's family in 1950s Arkansas.  Good.

8.  The Butterfly Garden by Chip St. Clair.  Memoir about childhood abuse.

9.  The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit.   This novel was written in a narrative voice of which I was previously unaware - the royal we.  "We took the car to the shop to get the oil changed."  "Some of our husbands left first."  "Our brothers said we looked like movie stars."  Da fuq?  Sorry, too distracting.  I got two pages in, leafed through the rest, and quit.

10.  My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin.  Novel written in 1895 about a young woman in the Australian Outback struggling with class and gender biases.  The protagonist is annoying, but the book is good.


So!  That's what I've been reading.  How about you?