Joanna > Recent Status Updates

Was planning to save this one to read on vacation next month...but I just couldn't wait. Great decision, as reading it makes you feel like you're escaping regular life and relaxing on the beach.

If you saw the movie and wondered WTF - read the novel.

So far it's like Sex in the City using the White House as its set. Even if they are running the country, apparently women still pretty much think mostly about shoes, purses, men, and fashionable dogs.

Interesting characters, doing interesting things.

I am riding out with Mattie to avenge her father's blood.

While the 'Anonymous' author thing was probably just a publicity grab, but it is also possible that the real author was too ashamed of his clunky and uninspired writing to want any credit for it.

The good news is that the main character is driving me slightly less crazy every time she dies.

I wish Jackie had still been around to edit this book - perhaps it would not be so dreadfully overwritten.

"...I was scared of lesbians. In fact, I would cross the street if I saw one coming toward me. One time I didn't cross the street and I ended up sleeping with a lesbian..." Yeah, I hate it when that happens.

"One hears whispers from the locker room is all. The fungus that dare not speak its name." Really, Jonathan Franzen? Really?!

As a feminist, I am horrified that none of the reviews I've read calling this book an ambitious masterpiece ever deigned to mention the matter-of-fact rape that takes place within the first 50 pages. Do reviewers not care about rape, or did none of them get this far in their reading?

If I were a soot covered Victorian runaway, I would also rather live in the bowels of a museum than on the streets of the East End.

It would seem that playing tennis and having a rest is not an effective cure for schizophrenia.

Madhouse.

"Apparantly Mr Fitzgerald - I believe that is how he spells his name - believes that plagarism begins at home..."

This book is making me want to throw away everything that I own.

I think this book will get more interesting when / if I can make it through the History of the Grid section, which I really don't care about much at all.

So far, it seems like Amy Adams was a perfect choice to play Julie Powell in the movie. Julie Powell is annoying as a writer in the exact same way and in the same measure that Amy Adams is annoying as an actress.

"The greatest Icelandic poet of all was a Viking named Egill Skallagrimsson, who lived about one thousand years ago and is widely known, as one Icelandic artist told me, 'as that mean motherfucker who wrote beautiful poetry.'"