Everyone Worth Knowing

Everyone Worth Knowing was pretty good. Again, people doing crazy jobs that I'd never even knew existed and sound a little far fetched. It's hard to believe people actually live like that and have those kind of lives. I also finished Waiting yesterday. Just in time for book club tonight! For different reasons, this was also about a complete different lifestyle and culture that is hard to imagine. I don't know if I felt bad for Lin, the main character, or not. I guess I feel worst for his wife, Shuyu. I'm not sure how I feel about Manna Wu either. It seems like they all ended up in situations that they couldn't really do anything about. That frustrates me b/c I feel like people should have more control over their lives. We'll have a lot to discuss at book club tonight.

I'm going to suggest The Myth of You and Me and Long Way Down and I need to come up with one more. I'm considering A Town Like Alice, or To Kill a Mockingbird, my two favorite books. I doubt either would be chosen but I still might suggest them.

The Mommy Fund

I recently finished The Mommy Fund by Madeleine Jacob. It was okay, a little hard to believe. There was also a whole lot of nothing in it. The whole shopping spree part was sort of long winded but unimportant. It could've been summed up a lot more succintly and not drawn out as much. I got that they went shopping and had their hair done and bought all these nice clothes, but ho hum, sort of boring. It also wasn't very believable, which is one of my pet peeves.

All in all, okay, not great. They could've cut way down on the New York trip and expanded the part at the end where the Mommy Fund (hence the title and, you would think, an important part of the book) is developed. They kind of glossed over exactly what the Mommy Fund is and how it worked.

I'm still reading First Families: The Impact of the White House on Their Lives by Bonnie Angelo and have started Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger. I'm not that far into it. What I should really be reading is Waiting by Ha Jin, my book club book. We meet on Monday. Ack!

Speak Softly, She Can Hear

I just finished Speak Softly, She Can Hear, by Pam Lewis. This book sort of snuck up on me. I started reading it while I was feeding Ryan and found it so disturbing, every time I picked it up I planned to get another book and read something else. Then I'd forget to bring another book up with me and would just keep reading it. It was disturbing b/c the first scene is a major scene in the book and the subject was not only disturbing, but something that made me feel uncomfortable to read while feeding my sweet little baby. I kept reading it though, mostly just because I didn't have another book handy, and found myself really wanting to find out what happened! Throughout the book, I kept wanting to make different choices for Carole. I wanted her to tell someone (her Mother, Father, Will?) not sure who, but understanding why she felt she couldn't. The end was tied up a little too neatly, and the fact that the author tried to redeem Naomi was a little annoying, but all in all it sucked me right in and kept me interested until the end, after I got past the wanting to put it down part. That was more b/c of the proximity to the baby than the content of the book though. I'll have to do a better job picking the books I'm going to read while feeding, although if that had been the case, I probably never would've read it. Outside of feeding time, I don't have a whole lot of time to read.

That's why it's taking me eons to read First Families: The Impact of the White House on Their Lives, by Bonnie Angelo. That's one of two books I'm reading right now. The other is The Mommy Fund by Madeline Jacob. This is an extremely light read that I'm not sure I'll finish. Although, based on my reasoning in the above paragraph, I probably will!

The book I should be reading is Waiting, by Ha Jin, this month's book club book. We meet on Monday at my house and I don't even have a copy of it yet. A friend from book club started it and couldn't finish it. That doesn't make me want to run out and get started. I will though. Maybe tomorrow...