What I read: Week of 2/26/12

So! Last week I did something I don't usually do, namely, I read a celebrity autobiography.

I am not sure what it was about this book that made me pull it off the library shelves.


Maybe it was something about the cover?


In fact, Rob, I DO.

It turns out that Rob Lowe is actually a competent writer, if indeed he actually wrote Stories I Only Tell My Friends himself. If he didn't, then he at least has good taste in ghostwriters. I give many props unto you, Mr. Lowe! And I very much appreciate the fact that you were unafraid to imply that Matt Dillon is kind of an ass and Tom Cruise is a whiny prima donna and Aaron Sorkin a pompous megalomaniac. As I said before, I am new to the celebrity bio, and your willingness to share your excellent inside gossip has gone a long way to inure me to the genre.

The whole issue of The Videotape is kind of glossed over in about three sentences, but it's not like I can't pull up old People articles to get the deets on that. I would, however, have liked a little more detail on the cast politics of The West Wing, because the little that Lowe offers on it is fascinating. It sounds like Lowe's fame ostracized him in the eyes of the writer and director and his co-actors, a bit, and I had NO IDEA and that explains a lot about what happened to the character of Sam Seaborn, which is something I was always a little "hrmmm?" about.

I also wish that I had not learned that Lowe's youngest son was named Johnowen, because that triggered a kind of editorial OCD in me and made my fingers itch to pick up my pencil and insert a space every time I saw it on the page. But all in all, I enjoyed this book. A quick, easy, dishy read.

I also finally read I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, and the only way I can think of to describe this book is to say that it was like a Dorothy Whipple novel written by Jonathan Safran Foer.


I also watched the excellent movie based on the book, which was one of the most faithful adaptations of a novel that I have ever read, and stars Romola Garai as the lovely Cassandra Mortmain and Bill Nighy as her eccentric writer father and I love them both, and so overall, I was very pleased with this whole experience.

And now, for the not-so-good: I read Still Life with Husband by Lauren Fox and I did not like it at all.


Actually, that is not true: I liked Fox's writing very much. It's hard to make a story about a woman blithely and unapologetically cheating on her husband feel sweet and tender and funny, but she managed. In places. In other places, she did not manage so well. The adulterous lover did an abrupt and douchey about-face towards the end, which made me think the douchey husband was going to do an abrupt and understanding about-face, but he did not, and the I CHOOSE ME ending had so little resolution that I actually checked the binding of this library book to see whether the last few pages had fallen out (they had not).

In between all this, I read Cat to Baby Lulu about 147 times. I can now recite the entire book but I have not yet grown tired of it, probably because it is short and there is something strangely addictive about stroking the fluffy cat's tail.



Lu is cranky and teething and spent a lot of the weekend sleeping in a Tylenol haze, so I spent a lot of time curled up on the couch with a book. It feels weird to say that I enjoyed the time to myself, since my kid was in a lot of pain. But those hours felt restorative, and fortified me for the hours in between naps.

What did you read this weekend?