don't fuck it up, brad pitt

The Imperfectionists made me:
1. Wish I had followed that vague in-the-back-of-my-head whim freshman year to switch into the journalism school at Northwestern, even though the whim had more to do with my lack of getting cast in anything worthwhile and less to do with being the next Christiane Amanpour.
2. Wish that if I ever write a novel, my first go is as good as this.
3. Wish that this lovely collection of loosely bound vignettes detailing the lives of various staffers at an international newspaper based in Rome wasn't already being made into a movie. Because it's too much and too good for that.
4. Wish my subway stop was always a little farther away so I didn't have to put this down and get up.

this is hilarious

Every now and then, Nora Ephron is good for something other than raising my romantic expectations.

it's my birthday and I'll blog if I want to

After the Infinite Jest debacle, I needed something readable and The Girl Who Played With Fire fit the bill, even if it contained enough confusing Sweedish names to make me think I was reading something more dense than it actually was.

But The Lovers. Oh, The Lovers. In the form of this short Vendela Vida novel, I got one of my best birthday presents of all this year: a really good cry.

infinite something

I surrender.

Life is too short to read Infinite Jest. Especially on vacation in Istanbul.

but it's such a nice cover

Sometimes there are books you judge by their covers. Or titles. Or attractive 27 year old Italian physicist authors (see here). This was all three. And of course, as I should have known, that turned out to be a bad idea. Attractive 27 year old Italian physicists should stick to physics and not writing. Especially not writing about two broken people whose inability to connect makes me unable to describe them as "a pair." Starting out with the individual incidents that encouraged our two protagonists to go inward, there was so much potential, but by the final pages, it was all I could do to keep from screaming at the book on the subway, "GET OVER IT, YOU PUSSIES. MAN THE FUCK UP AND GREET THE REAL WORLD."

flashbacks

I remember very little about my freshman year of college. I think I've blocked most of it out, especially the awful outdoor production of The Taming of the Shrew (I was Bianca. That's how off the production was.). I hung out with a group of girls from my dorm a lot, my roomie and the girls from the two rooms next to ours. One of those girls went to Columbine, a fact she didn't share verbally but was broadcast by the old high school tshirts she'd wear to bed. One of the few things I do remember is this group of girls went to see "Bowling for Columbine" some night on campus. She insisted she wanted to go, she felt she was up for it. After all, she hadn't even been at Columbine when the massacre happened, she was in the 8th grade. But the movie upset her more than she expected, especially the cavalier reactions of her fellow students. We spent the evening in her room, listening to her rant and cry. I think I remember this moment because it was one of the first times I understood how much growing up sucks. Your friends will be upset about things that are bigger than losing a soccer game or getting an A- on a test and you can't fix these things by treating them to a frappucino. The point of this is, when I saw this book, Columbine, at Jackson McNally, I immediately purchased it, thinking about that past moment. I also was intrigued by the book's style, hearkening back to In Cold Blood. It didn't let me down. I was so drawn into this story about two young men, about a community, about the media, about a police force struggling to handle the unhandleable. Fascinating and moving and somehow, entirely judgment free. Obviously, I'll never understand what my friend was going through that night freshman year, but I appreciate having a better understanding.