Elizabeth's Books

I have a complicated relationship with Jennifer Weiner that exists completely in my head.

Someday I really will stop being attracted to sad stories of women abused by men. But today is not that day.

 

I cannot recommend a better way to bond with your teenager than for both of you to read The Hunger Games and the sequel, Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games) .

I finally broke down and read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because of the number of people who recommended it to me. Plus, there's only so much of being left out of the pop-culture loop that I can take.

 

When a book starts off with a quote from Proust, I'm always wary that I'm about to embark on a ship of pretension. Luckily, after a bit of a slow start, Jennifer Egan takes the reader on a fascinating ride that explores time, loss, and aging, all filtered through a backdrop of music.

In my less charitable moments, I think “oh, those people with money, beautiful children and a successful surgeon husbands ... what a hard, hard life they have.”

The One That I Want: A Novel is a chick-lit novel combined with a dash of sci-fi and a large walloping of self-help nonsense. After the thrill of Allison Winn Scotch’s Time of My Life: A Novel , it feels like a letdown.

It's been a long time since a book consumed me to the point where I really didn't want to do anything - eat, work, take out the dog - other than finish it. The Hunger Games is that addictive, to the point where I hollered "nooooo" upon learning that the end of The Hunger Games is only the end of book one, and that author Suzanne Collins has actually written a trilogy. (There are currently 86 people on the Baltimore County library waiting list for the third installment, Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games) . It comes out at the end of August).

A few years ago, after reading yet another book involving a plucky teenage heroine and her physically abusive father, I snapped to my book club, "I am so over abuse books."

Which is terrible, because I know that while Me & Emma is nowhere in the same literary ballpark as say, The Bluest Eye (Vintage International) , I know books like those offer a measure of escape and hope for teenagers and women in similar situations. Or, just because I hated The Secret Life of Bees doesn't mean it lacks merit.

I was at a wedding last week and talking to someone who works in a lab. I mentioned I was reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and that it was about the woman behind the HeLa cells. “Oh, the HeLa cells,” she said, her face lighting up. “Everyone works with the HeLa cells.” Yep.