SFist Reads
Ack! We're overwhelmed! We had a bumper crop of hotly anticipated online reserves come in this week! We haven't even had a moment to pick up any of our recent purchases from our local independent bookstorest. We need some sort of triage system. Help!
SFist Jackson, who's no stranger to looking for work in the corporate world, just finished Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch. While her easy and engaging prose made for a quick read (he finished the whole thing in an evening), it wasn't nearly as tightly composed narrative as her previous effort, Nickle and Dimed. Also, the empathy she had in the previous book was sorely lacking, and she often comes off as arrogant and 'superior' to the other people, which belies a life spent in sheltered in academia and non-profits. Nothing in her reporting is particularly shocking to anyone who's actually had to conform to an office dress code. Plus, she never did get a job, so the conclusions are rather anti-climactic.
SFist Rita just finished Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot, which chronicles the life of a Manhattan woman who's slightly adrift from life. Kind of a less well-written white-girl version of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, but for some reason, SFist Rita is a sucker for the format of chronological short-story-ish chapters. Also, there's some mildly funny one-liners in the book, for which Bank is renown.
SFist Eve is reading Over Her Dead Body, a "mystery" novel by Kate White, the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan. So far, it's nothing too remarkable. She's disappointed because she hoped that the book would be more The Devil Wears Prada (a reasonable expectation from a book written by an industry insider, isn't it?) and less Murder She Wrote. She's only on page 200 out of 374, so she's holding fast to the hope that the really good dirt is just around the corner.