Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Eat my dust, Michiko Kakutani

Since my blog promises to uncover “what I’m reading,” I feel I need to share a few recent discoveries that I’ve quite enjoyed over the past few weeks:

She Got Up Off The Couch, by Haven Kimmel. I freakin’ love Haven Kimmel. If you haven’t read anything by her yet, then close out of this window right now and haul ass to a bookstore. Seriously. Her quirky essays about growing up in Moorland, Indiana, are amazing and touching and hilarious. This particular book features one about her older brother Dan literally took my breath away. On a side note, Haven’s also friends with Augusten Burroughs, which frankly elevates her street cred in my mind Quite A Bit.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer. This guy’s previous book was all over the hipster bookstores in Seattle for a long-ass while, but I never really paid attention to him before this. I’m definitely paying attention now. Okay, so he’s like twelve and that's annoying, but I try not to think about it. This book is about the weeks/months after 9/11 written from the perspective of a nine-year-old trying to make sense of his father's death. He comes across as vaguely Owen Meany-esque, which is not a bad thing at all. Um, did I mention Foer’s kind of adorable for being twelve?

Little Earthquakes, by Jennifer Weiner. Once you stop giggling about her last name and wipe the tears from your eyes, this is a good book to pick up and read. It’s all about new moms and babies, a topic that I usually find incredibly boring, but this one is interesting even for the most die-hard singletons out there. I love Jennifer Weiner. I want to have coffee and doughnuts with her and be her BFF while we watch bad infomercials together in our stretchy black pants. Did I mention she has a nifty (albeit sometimes too blatently commercial) blog?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just found out, by clicking on her blog, that Jennifer Weiner wrote "In Her Shoes," which I LOVED as a movie. (I know, I watched the movie before reading the book.) Your praise of her has made me want to go out and read the book now...if I didn't already have a stack of history books to read for school, that is. It will have to be put on my pleasure reading list for later. On a side note, I have dusted off my old Morrissey CDs after being reminded of his angsty, sensitive, English-accented voice under your "Listening" section. Ahhhhh...thank you...I missed him.