Books I Read in May

Most recent book club pick:  Bossypants by Tina Fey

The back of this book lists some advance praise for the memoir, one of which is:

"Totally worth it."  - Trees

If that makes you laugh, or at least smile to yourself, you'll like this book.  

I'm a sucker for a memoir in the first place (it's probably my favorite genre), and Tina doesn't disappoint.  She recounts stories spanning her life, from her childhood to college years to early days as a working adult to her work on SNL and her current show 30 Rock.  She's incredibly good at mixing humor with sentimentality (as seen in the chapter dedicated to how awesome her dad is, or the one that is a mother's prayer for her daughter), and just talks about a lot of stuff about being a woman.  She's a wife and a mom, yes, (uh, scary breastfeeding chapter for those who have never done it), but also a woman in a workplace, a woman who is getting older, and a woman who is now a little glamorous when she used to not really be so much.  

Here's an excerpt of an entire chapter, entitled "What Turning Forty Means To Me":

I need to take my pants off as soon as I get home.  I didn't used to have to do that.  But now I do.

Tina Fey is cool in a way only other people who used to be (or still are) equally as dorky as she was can relate to.

YA Picks:  The rest of the Jessica Darling series by Megan McCafferty

I talked about reading the first two books in this series here,  and now I've finished the last three!  Done and done.

Charmed Thirds follows our heroine, Jessica, through her entire college career at Columbia University.  I was slightly disappointed to find that it really didn't focus on her college experience so much as just the ups and downs of her relationship with her loner hottie boyfriend.  Also, it felt sort of weird to cover four years in one book.

Well, as if Ms. McCafferty somehow sensed my future uneasiness about covering four years in one book, Fourth Comings covers only one week in the life of Jessica!  She's grown up and graduated and in the "real world" but her real world life is kind of pathetic and to top it off, she's dealing with a marriage proposal she isn't really ready for.  This book I liked.

Then came Perfect Fifths.  You know how sometimes you read all the books in a series and you've enjoyed them for the most part so you're looking forward to the final installment but then you read it and it seems like it's completely different (and not in a good way) from all the other previous books and you just feel sort of let down when you're finished (Breaking Dawn, I am talking directly to you)?  That's sort of how I felt about this one.  Books 1-4 are all told as entries in Jessica's journal, but in the last book, it's completely third person, no journal writing at all, and the whooooole book takes place within about 18 hours.  I felt like it was a huge departure from the first four, and it just kind of threw me off.  That being said, I also read it in one sitting because I needed to find out what happened to these characters in the end!  I was mildly pleased with the outcome.