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Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me by Ben Karlin
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Audacity of Hope by Mister President
The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells
When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris

Sloane Crosley’s book of humorous essays, in the vein of David Sedaris’s work, proves the rule that nothing is funnier than the truth. Her stories of being a young single woman in New York are never dull and never usual and, at times, quite insightful.

I have to say, I only picked up this book because the title cracked me up. That’s a sentiment I can relate to. In this case, I’m glad I judged the book by its cover, because it was the most delightful thing I’ve read in a long time.

Here’s the first of my book reviews. I’ll just go ahead and say I highly recommend this book.

Dr. Katie Carr is a good person. She’s a good doctor and a mother and a wife. But her husband is an angry cynical man, who never misses a chance to verbally snipe at her or the kids. So, she feels justified when she ends up in the arms of another man and asks for a divorce. That’s where the book starts and it’s a slow burn full of awkward tension, neither party doing anything to make their pain end. Until one day the husband, David, meets a faith-healer type called GoodNews, who turns him into a happy, good-doing zombie, full of pious self-righteousness. The rest is Katie’s struggle to figure out this new man sleeping in her bed and to be tolerant to his hapless and naive attempts to help all of the people in the world.

It’s a pretty simple and quite funny story. And Hornby’s writing is light and his tone is never quite fully serious, despite the serious subject matter. Katie’s insistence that she’s a good person and her ever-present self-consciousness about it rings really true to me. The part that tickled me most is that Dick, from Hornby’s High Fidelity, makes a cameo. It’s a small, walk-on part, but he’s such a delightful character, even when he doesn’t have dialogue, that it reminds you of Hornby’s potential to be brilliant.

If you suspend your disbelief about the actual healing powers of GoodNews (although the story of how they came to him is actually hilarious) and just think of him as one of the crazy people at the airport trying to sell you paper flowers, it’s a lot easier to swallow. But the story’s not about him, anyway. It’s about Katie and how she got to be unhappy. I don’t want to ruin it, but I instantly related with her and at the end of the book, when she achieves some sort of clarity about the source of her misery, I felt my time hadn’t been wasted.

The problem is I have pretty specific taste and I tend to stick with that and I’m really unfamiliar with other genres and mainstream fiction in general. So, when I walk into a book store I’m immediately lost and overwhelmed. I really need to read more fiction and broaden my horizons to be a better writer. You’ve never heard of a writer that doesn’t read, right?

Until then, I’m just trying to get back in the habit of reading a lot, since I have more time, now. I went out today and just browsed and picked up two random books that are relevant to my interests and I figure I’ll go from there.

I have a real problem with spending fifteen bucks on a book that I might not like. I’m going to have to stick to the library or bargain books, I think. I’m going to make an entry with a review for each book in my reading queue, though. And I think when I’ve read ten I’ll mark this done.