hiatus

geez, i've not been reading like at all lately. just school stuff mainly. lots of poems and short stories and such. anyway. spring break is coming up next week and i intend to read my butt off! well. no. but hopefully i'll finish at least two books. :)

stephania

i started ilona karmel's stephania just a few hours into march 4th as sort of the ultimate tribute to myself and my bday. i actually also only bought the book because it's title has a strong resemblance to my name. at any rate, it should've been no surprise that it was a pretty good read (there goes that egotism again...). it's about a polish jew named stephanie who's ::gasp:: 23 and in the hospital for surgery to get rid of her hunchback. ... like me she isn't always the easiest person to get along with but she's alright. she's pretty, smart and when she wants to be, quite friendly and nice. as i was reading the book i kept expecting one of those 'light breaking thru the clouds' moments. an epiphany. alas, no such moment occurred. still, it was a pretty good book. an easy read with a good pace. reminded me a bit of somerset's of human bondage. which is one of my favorite books. that's also about a young person with a physical affirmity (a boy this time, wit a clubfoot) and how they learn to deal with it.

march 2006

stacey j lee - unraveling the 'model minority' stereotype: listening to asian american youth
ilona karmel - stephania
tim cahill - road fever
samantha ettus - the experts' guide to 100 things everyone should know how to do

jane magazine

jane magazine. good stuff. well written articles, good layouts, interesting fashion shoots, not your usual fluff magazine. i normally read lucky and in style. i like vogue but it's a bit too serious for me. as is vanity fair. allure and elle are okay but i'll only get one if i like the cover. jane however, good stuff. esp the new section they have at back "back stories". they're little op-ed pieces. this month they have one of a woman who's boif convinces her to go to therapy to help her get over him going to a bachelor party in vegas (i identify wit her fears), an asian girl too 'lazy' to tape up her eyelids and get surgery, a couple that has sex in front of others for money, a home birthing article, and a thoughtful piece on the "commercialization of cattiness" (all those 'bitch' tee-shirts: the 'i slept wit your boyfriend' variety.) for the back stories alone, worth every penny of the cheapo $1.99 it cost.

esquire presents...

recently got esquire presents what it feels like... which was pretty good but surprisingly a bit of a disappointment as well. you see, i'd never actually seen the book before i bought it. i just found out about it from somewhere online and thought it looked really cool. and then i bought it on ebay. anyway, the content of the book was pretty good. some good topics. wat it feels like to be in a tornado, be a mob hitman, be in an orgy, go thru an exorcism, have a sever stutter, change from a male to a female (and vice versa), get shot in the head, give birth, be an albino... but the actual accounts were pretty bad. there's not a lot of actual description. the whole basis of the book is that they tell you wat it feels like so you don't have to go thru the same experience. but even after reading it you don't feel like you've lived thru any of it! well, the walking on the moon one was pretty good. and so wat the giving birth one. and starving... anyway. some are good, some are bad. but some are appallingly bad. each one is very short anyway. maybe only 200 words, if even that. and even then they don't always get right to the point. at any rate. it was a pretty interesting read, if not particularly good. i say... read it, but don't buy it.

bryson

so i've read bill bryson's the lost continent as well as his in a sunburned country (both travel writings). sunburned, i must say, was a million times better than lost continent. i actually read sunburned first and really liked it. loved it actually. so i was really interested in reading his other books. but this book was a bit of a disapointment. i think lost continent was one of his first works so he wasn't very good with the actual travel bits, like the introductions of states, bits of trivia, information about places visited. he did a much better job with sunburned. you actually learn a lot from this book. it will in no way replace an actual travel guide but it does provide lots of silly and rather useless statistical information. lost continent actually gets better with this info stuff as you read along. however in other aspects it doesn't get better. in sunburned it's obvious that he loves australia and is really happy to be visiting. he has nice things to say about everyone and everything. he doesn't bs tho. if he doesn't find it charming he says so. but in lost continent he's just an ass. oh sure we kno that he left america at basically the first chance he got so of course we're not expecting him to be in love the states or anything. but he's so mean! he's highly critcal and talks shit about nearly everything! he doesn't, by far, seem like the type of person i'd want to travel with. in this book anyway. sunburned country is really good. they say a walk in the woods is also really good but i'm a bit put off from lost country. really, that's how bad it is. or mabye it's just that my expectations were so raised from sunburned. in any case. i didn't enjoy it nearly as much as i had hoped i would.