SFist Reads
SFist was out for drinks with some colleagues (good luck, Jillian!) when she heard herself start preaching the gospel of the SFPL online reserve system. Now we're sure everyone we work with thinks we're a total dork (if they didn't already). Maybe we should have encouraged everyone to shop their local independent bookstores, instead--does that sound cooler?
SFist Matt fell in line and finished Blink. He asks "Did you get to the part about how autistic people are different from normal people because they're don't look at faces? I was like, 'normal people look at faces? who knew?' thanks to Blink, now i'm scared that my general failure to make eye contact is a sign of late-onset autism."
SFist Rain recently finished Jean Nathan's The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright a biography of the children's book author. A friend had given her one of the Lonely Doll books as a birthday present, and hearing that the author had turned out to be kind of a kook, she sought out the biography eagerly. She was a little disappointed. Granted, Dare Wright was a little too close to her mother, was clearly in love with her brother, and never married, but her truly bizarre behavior didn't really start until her later years, and the author kind of skims over that part. Still, the book is full of awesome photos, and does provide an interesting portrait of an odd, but very talented woman.
Image from this lovely doll-collector's site
SFist Jackson just finished his borrowed copy of Eric Schlosser's Reefer Madness, about the black market economy in the United States. He thinks that Schlosser is one of the preeminent advocacy journalists working today, and that he has a clear, well-paced narrative style, though Fast Food Nation is a more focused effort than this. Also, Schlosser presents the ironies in his subjects in rather dry terms, rather than exploiting them for humor, which would definitely lighten
up the otherwise somber mood.
Sfist Mary-Lynn is is wallowing in guilt and reading Phi Beta Bimbo, which is such a guilty pleasure even the SFPL doesn't carry it! (she remarks: "shut up, sometimes the brain needs to turn to mush to survive"). She's also reading The Best American Magazine Writing 2004, (because god knows not even what she terms her ridiculous consumption of magazines means she has the skills to get through the New Yorker in a timely manner).
SFist Eve is on the last 20 pages of Smashed. She finds this memoir "of drunken girlhood" to be compulsively readable, and she applauds the author, Koren Zailckas, for her frankness and her sense of responsibility -- at no time does she blame her compulsion to binge drink on anyone other than her own sense of insecurity and desire to "self-medicate". However, the stories of drunken excess become repetitive over time (drunk on yucky booze, barfing, etc), and we yearn for a deeeper exploration of her drive to drink herself to death at such a young age. Eve gets the sense that the author was very conscious of friends and family who might read this book, and therefore pussy-foots around some issues.