Where oh where did the time go?

Where has the time gone? I can't believe it's been a whole month since I last reviewed a book-I've read a ton since then! It seems that life has gotten crazier with each passing day. Since my last post I left on a whirlwind trip to France and Switzerland and a couple days after I got back I was back to work. As a teacher I enjoy my long summer breaks, maybe a little too much. It was really tough to get back in the swing of work and in the run up to the first day of school not much other than work related things were getting done. (Okay a lot of wedding planning stuff was getting done)

I did find some time to catch up on a boatload of reading though and I have several different books on tap to review soon.

First up is “The Bling Ring” by Nancy Jo Sales. If you watched the short lived E! show “Pretty Wild” you already know a little bit about the Bling Ring (or if you followed TMZ during 2009-2010). If you haven’t watched “Pretty Wild” it’s on Netflix streaming, go take a gander at the trainwreck. Alexis Neiers, one of the main cast members and a participant in the Bling Ring, was addicted to heroin while filming and it’s a sad thing to watch her go more and more off the rails. (I’m happy to report she has since gotten sober, gotten married and had a child).

“The Bling Ring” tells the tail of spoiled California rich kids who are jealous of the celebrities they aspire to be one day. These high school students covet the designer wardrobes and expensive jewelry of their favorite celebrities. While many of us can relate to this obsession (I admit to a lust for designer products) these teens took it too far.

Instead of just lusting from the sidelines they take action to achieve their dreams. They started a business, it’s really a heartwarming story of kids achieving the American dream. Well, except for the fact that their side business was robbing the very celebrities they admired. These high school students would stalk the celebrities on TMZ and other websites to find out when they were out of town and then break into their houses.

Nancy Jo Sales is a writer for Vanity Fair and wrote the article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins” covering the case. The article got even more press when Alexis Neiers left Nancy Jo a ranting, sobbing, ridiculous voicemail and the frenzied recording and re-recording of the message was aired on “Pretty Wild”. The clip then appeared on “The Soup” and various other talk shows and suddenly was a bit of a cult phenomenon (only in America).  

The book is just an expansion on the article and not a very good one at that. Sales attempts to take something that is by nature a ridiculous story of excess and greed and turn it into a psychology paper. She is constantly delving into the psychology behind why these kids possibly felt the way they felt and she tried to dive into the collective psyche of the American populace.

In all honesty, no one is interested in the psychology of these ridiculous teenagers and their ridiculous obsession. We admired them because they did something so completely off the wall and we vilified them because they did something they shouldn’t have and barely acted contrite about it. 80% of the book’s information has already been covered in the extensive media coverage surrounding the case and the other 20% isn’t really that interesting to begin with. Nancy Jo inserts her self so seamlessly into the case that her personal biases really show through the writing. She presents Nick Prugo in a sympathetic, wounded victim light and presents the rest of the defendants as evil and manipulative. It is rare that the truth is so polarizing and while it may be true that the other defendants were manipulative not all of the blame can be taken away from Prugo. Is it any surprise that Nick was the defendant that Nancy Jo spent the most time with?

The book was made into a highly anticipated and badly reviewed movie directed by Sofia Coppola. It seemed like every person in the world detested this movie. I was lucky enough to score myself and the dear fiance (who’s a really good sport about girly movies) a private showing (okay to be fair it was a private showing because we went in the middle of the day and no one else wanted to see the movie-you haven’t seen awkward until you’re the only two people in a movie theater) and I loved it.

The movie was exactly what I expected of the book, it didn’t try too hard. It capitalized on the humor, the ridiculous and some odd form of glamour that came out the story without trying to psychoanalyze the participant. It made the characters seem human instead of the strange characters they appeared to be in the book. They weren’t some symbol of national decay and the changing mores of American society, they were portrayed for what they really were-ridiculous teenagers with WAY too much free time, a slightly unhealthy obsession and overindulgent parents.

Overall, “The Bling Ring” gets a ⅖

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I Love Everybody (If everybody is my dog)

It was a very busy weekend at our house. Saturday the dear fiance and I adopted a puppy from our local shelter!

Meet Massey!

She's a ten month old (according to the vet) Lab puppy. She was given to the shelter by her first family because they just couldn't deal with her puppy behaviors (chewing, housebreaking issues etc.). We didn't take this decision lightly, I've been begging the fiance for several years for a dog. When we finally bought our house in January I was totally ready to head straight to the shelter and pick out a dog, he stepped in and said we had to wait until summer so I would be home all the time to work with the dog. In mid April my parents had to make the tough decision to put down our 12 year old chocolate lab and my jonesing for a dog increased exponentially. We went on Saturday and looked at several dogs and ultimately decided on her because she seemed calm and happy. She is, at least partially, she is totally calm if both of us are sitting in the room with her. Her sole goal in life is to be with her people and she isn't particularly happy if we aren't all together. There is nothing more she loves than cuddling with me or sleeping at my feet (of course the second I move she's all over the place). She also throws up in the car and likes to run wild in the yard and chase birds and bugs. She also hasn't quite yet mastered the "come" command (as evidenced by her taking off into our wheat field today and refusing to return), but she's great at sitting down!

This is a lot of backstory for a blog about books, but I honestly cannot stop gushing about my sweet little girl. It's fun to see her personality develop so quickly and to see how different she is from other dogs. I have known. However, she requires a lot of attention and work and for that exact reason I've read a grand total of two pages this weekend. Getting a new puppy is a lot like having a baby (not that I've every actually had a baby but the concept seems similar) and I wasn't too interested in my book (even though it is an awesome book). Turns out even for an avid reader when you have something as cute as a new puppy book reading tends to go by the wayside.

However, I did finish Laurie Notaro's book and without further ado here is my short and brief review.

I've admitted to a fondness for Laurie Notaro so it's not a surprise that I adored "I Love Everybody and Other Atrocious Lies". Laurie is like a meaner (and slightly stupider...in a good way) version of myself. Her writing verbalizes my internal monologue. I especially connected with her struggles to get her book published and the struggle when yet another rejection letter arrived in the mail.

She says "Each said I sucked. Each said I was 'not right for their needs.' Each wished me 'good luck
 in my pursuit to get my book published. And they meant it, the same way my mom meant it when I told her I had finally found a boy that liked me back" (61). When I read those sentences and the continuing rant about how all she would have to do to get her book published is become Anne Heche or Oprah Winfrey and I connected. The best thing a book can do for me (or any reader) is to make a connection with the reader. It's a tough thing to do, especially in the memoir genre when the author is sharing specific stories about their own life. I've read a lot of memoirs that I just can't connect to, it's almost becoming an overdone genre with entirely too many people telling stories that to be honest aren't that interesting (Living Oprah comes to mind). It's a tough balance to strike, you have to be honest yet it is difficult to make the mundane funny and exciting. Notaro strikes that balance with ease, she's able to take the smallest most mundane events that every person has experienced (shopping at Costco, going to the movies and helping the elderly with their electronics) and turn them into something epic.

When I read her book I feel like I can look at my most mundane activities and find the humor in them all. It's a gift really to look at shopping at Costco (sub in Sam's Club for me, we're too much of a cow town to get the fabulous Costco) and write several whole pages about it (To be fair I can write several pages about shopping at Target-but absolutely no one wants to actually read them) and make me laugh out loud. I'm sure if I could get my dear fiance to read it he would identify with Laurie's long suffering husband Victor (since I'm sure the reports he gets about my day sometimes sound like her books in the level of ridiculous).

I'm giving this one 5/5

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