Book report

[stormkeeper_lovedoris]

My rating system:

10 – life-changing, an all-time favorite

5 - average for what I read

1 – terrible; why did I finish it?

How To Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell – Just to get this out of the way first: the author is an asshole. She’s a drug addicted party girl whose life has been spent caring about no one but herself, and sometimes I wish everyone like her would vanish from the planet. Anyway, but her memoir is really good. Her writing is sharp and funny, she tells us how she got into this mess, what her life was like as a beauty editor at various major magazines and how she tried to function despite being addicted to multiple different drugs. I will also give her credit for owning all her flaws and basically admitting she’s a clueless asshole. Grade: 6

All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg – This was a great, short novel about a woman living in New York City and trying to determine who she is and where she wants her life to go. The story is told in a series of vignettes about her life; the chapters aren’t chronological but that’s okay, it all pulls together well anyway. The writing is immediate, wry, and moving. Each character is fully developed and feels like a real person. Grade: 8

Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg by Michael Perry – So the subtitle basically tells you what the book is about. Perry and his wife are farmers in Wisconsin, and he tells you the day to day about their life. They seem like lovely people, it’s just that the book dragged on. It was a series of nice enough anecdotes about their life but it just wasn’t very compelling. Grade: 3

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai – This audiobook has been on my “to read” list for a long time, and it finally came up! The book was exactly what I thought it would be, and I have nothing critical to say of it. We hear of Malala’s (brief) life before she was shot, a bit about her awesome dad and his upbringing (her dad really is amazing), the shooting, and the aftermath. Go Malala!! Grade: 8

It Ended Badly by Jennifer Wright – This is only the second book of Wright’s that I’ve read, and I will read literally anything she publishes. I first read her “Get Well Soon”, about plagues throughout history – she writes in an utterly hilarious and engaging way. Her earlier book, “It Ended Badly” is just as amazing. Funny, sharp, completely compelling. The topic here is 13 bad breakups in history, though I truly believe Wright could write well about any subject. Grade: 9