Mindy's back!

I realize that I'm the Girl Who Cried Busy, and I fully accept that no one really believes how insanely busy I've been since I graduated in May but wow. Busy.

I did finally read something though, and I make no apologies for it being a celebrity memoir (it's too much work to incorporate "collection of personal essays" into this sentence grammatically) because Mindy Kaling! I loved her first book and when I realized the second one was coming I actually preordered it -- in hardcover! That's how much I was committed to this book.

Things I learned finding this image: Enrique Iglesias has covered a song titled "Why Not Me"

I've set you up for a "but" there, but I didn't mean to. This is a book with a different character compared to the first one, but if you like Kaling's sense of humor you'll like this book too. I habitually make a distinction between things that I like, and things that I think have objective merit (which is obviously a subjective judgement, but just go with it); I think Why Not Me? is maybe a little less meritorious than Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? but both are definitely things that I like.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? was a seriously polished book. In my post about it, I talked about how well-written it was, and it definitely felt like someone absolutely putting her best foot forward on a project that meant a lot to her. Multiple times since I read it, I've thought that I should re-read it, and I've always felt confident recommending it to people because I don't think you have to be predisposed to like her in order to find the book funny. Why Not Me? is a little more disjointed -- in the foreword she describes it as "more personal" and it certainly is. Structurally, the chapters are of very differing lengths and some feel a little more like filler than others. They are laugh-out-loud funny but often end with some very heartfelt reflection. I think it's a testimony to Kaling's talent that those sincere "moral-to-the-story" parts landed with me and didn't feel lame or tacked on. The whole book feels a little more relaxed, like the kind of friendship where you can just talk about what's going on without putting a spin on it or making it feel like a story that's going to have a tidy ending. Kaling can bring the comedy but she can also tell you what she's learned, if anything. Why Not Me? really does feel more personal, not in a schmoozy 60 Minutes/People interview kind of way, but in a really honest way, like someone who doesn't have anything to prove. That does mean, however, that I think you have to have some prior goodwill in order to really fully like the book.

I definitely recommend this book, especially if you liked Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? I think the last chapter is one of the best; it's a really good essay about confidence. The chapter where she outlines her working day is fascinating, and puts my "crazy" schedule to shame. Maybe for most of you this is a library wait-list book, and it's worth a spot on that list. Meanwhile, I will be ready for whatever question comes next. Is That What I Look Like From Behind maybe? Or Who Do I Have To Kill To Get Some Licorice In Here?

PS, how on trend are the colors on that cover? Those are basically the colors of my dream living room, the one in the alternate universe where I am not an impoverished slob.

Thank you!

You were right. Yep, I feel pretty confident in predicting (projecting?) that you, dear reader, probably read The Rosie Project and then wrote a blog post or a tweet or something about how cute it was. When I saw that, I made a little mental note. And you were totally right!

I was at a book swap event* and spotted this being put out onto the Romance table, and immediately I thought, That's that book my dear internet friend -- yes, her/him -- said was adorable! Gotta grab that one! So thank you for that recommendation, because it was adorable. I read the whole thing today, start to finish, breakfast to dinner. I thought it was like having a really good burger and fries and beer at the end of a long day. There might not be anything especially innovative or surprising about that, but it's so satisfying.

The haul.

A photo posted by Julie (@jfount2) on Apr 16, 2015 at 4:59pm PDT

* The book swap was quite interesting. I can't help myself, I am always interested in how things get organized and I've been thinking about the concept of book swaps lately since at least three have appeared on my radar this month. The one I went to was totally free (*fist pump*). People arrived with their books (the organizers requested a maximum of 15). They dropped the books off at the front table. The organizers then assembled stacks of same-genre books and carried them out to the genre tables as rapidly as they could. Us patrons milled around in an addicting loop examining the tables. It was all extremely simple, and devilishly hard to leave because there were new books being put out constantly and what if. In this case, the leftover books were going to be donated to Open Books, Everyone's Favorite Book-Selling Chicago Literacy Organization. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the books (although of course there were some clunkers being offloaded too). I brought eight and left with five, which I was quite pleased about.

As so often is the case, the ending of The Rosie Project was less fun than the rest of the book, but that was ok. The best parts were the "Don is oblivious" parts so the conclusion was bound to be a little underwhelming. I mean:

'You want to share a taxi?' asked Rosie.
It seemed a sensible use of fossil fuel.

Adorbs. I saw the ending coming from a mile away but it was fine; just because you know that burger and fries are going to be awesome doesn't make them any less awesome.

I was sort of intrigued by the little author interview in the back of my edition, where Simsion reveals that the book is actually the product of many years chasing a passion for screenwriting. I have to admit, that's not the kind of thing I expect someone to admit to: a kind of Plan B success. Or Plan C, I guess, since Simsion had a career in IT that he quit for film. I feel like this little anecdote will be useful in the future.

Oh, and I scored 61 on the questionnaire (also in the back of my edition).

"Abroad isn't at all what it was."

The Towers of Trebizond was a Newberry Book Sale purchase that almost wasn't. I picked it up and put it down, and picked it up, rinse, repeat. On the one hand, the camel on the cover is pretty cool-looking; on the other, sigh, that woman is drinking from a Union Jack teacup. Union Jack teacups make me feel a bit tired.

It turned out that my ambivalence about the cover was a premonition. The book follows Laurie, the narrator, a young woman who accompanies her Aunt Dot and Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg on a mission to Turkey to convert Muslims to high-church Anglicanism and introduce the women to freedom, education, and hats. (This was published in the early 1950s, if that description makes you raise an eyebrow.) It's relentlessly comic and intensely Anglican. Let us take as our text:

A group of inhabitants stood by the road as we drove up; they were dark and sad, and they may have been Rogues, but I thought they looked more like those obscure, dejected, maladjusted, and calamity-prone characters who come into Tenebrae, such as Aleph, Teth, Beth, Calph, Jod, Ghimel, Mem, and the rest, and they sounded as if they were talking in that afflicted strain that those characters talk in, and saying things like 'he has brought me into darkness and not into light', 'he has compassed me with gall and labour', 'he has built against me round about, that I may not get out, he has upset my paths', and ' my eyes have failed with weeping, my bowels are disturbed, my liver is poured out', and so on, till all the lights go out and there is nothing but the dark.

Laurie speaks/is written in these long, run-on sentences that convey naivety or something and it got old for me fast. I think she's meant to be sort of "daughter of the house" age, i.e. between 17 and 21? but I don't know, it just bugged me. And then while I get that Tenebrae joke (a) I feel I deserve a gold star for getting it, and (b) it's, like, twice as long as it should be.

I could see the humor on the page but it just didn't connect. Sentences like this:

Father Chantry-Pigg always spoke as if he had just parted from the Byzantines, and was apt to sigh when he mentioned them, though, as aunt Dot pointed out, he had missed them by five centuries.

 make me feel sure that there are people out there for whom this is a cherished book, The Funniest Book On Earth, but for me every recognizable foible or outlandish personality quirk got instantly beaten to death and then ground into powder with Laurie's long sentences and slow-moving paragraphs.

You will not, at this point, be surprised if I say that I got to page 53, mostly by skimming, and then remembered with relief the concept of giving a book fifty pages to grab your interest. I'm disappointed, though, because I was planning to look super smart by making a connection between this book and Scoop. Maybe someday I'll be in a better mood and come back to this, but for now I am moving on.

This post brought to you in a cleft stick

Fun fact: you can be "finishing your dissertation" for a year (or more!) but at some point, you have to actually finish the dang thing -- and it's, like, work. But then, as you wait for the defense and hope hope hope there are five people not hating your work, you have some weird awkward space to attempt job applications and read things again.

When I bought this copy of Scoop at Open Books, having skipped out of a play with Alice like delinquents or possibly discerning theater-goers, she said something like, "you found a pretty-covered Waugh!" It is that exactly; I like these very distinctive editions, although I'm not fond of the fact that they have not even one sentence of plot description on the back. Look, I just want to be sure I haven't read this one before, but I guess I'm just supposed to be sold by the author's name. It's Waugh, what more could you possibly want to know, I imagine the publisher saying. Or it could be ironically appropriate since in Waugh's books actually knowing anything is generally a handicap, and those who can spin a line, go with the flow, bluff their way through, are the ones who get ahead.

Scoop is certainly in that vein; a socialite convinces a newspaper magnate to hire a trendy writer friend to cover a civil war in Africa, but the newspaper ends up hiring a rather Bilbo-ish country life columnist with a similar name and sending him instead. The civil war isn't real, unless maybe it is, although it doesn't really matter as long as the reports being filed at home are exciting enough.

Like A Handful of Dust, this is a book with a sharp, almost contemptuous driving energy. Western ideologues and journalists have concocted the fake civil war, while capitalist-imperialist interests are behind whatever is actually happening. No one operates under any concept of truth or justice, and this is as true in the fictitious Ismaelia as in London. I was reminded of the current fluster about Ebola as I read; hundreds or thousands of people can die in Africa but it doesn't get as much reaction as one death (or one possible ill person!) in America or Western Europe. Waugh's not making quite that point, but he is talking about a similar kind of self-centeredness and callousness.

It occurs to me that I might not describe Scoop as "funny". It is funny, start to finish it's funny; but if I had a dedicated shelf for comedy, it wouldn't get shelved there. (I am tagging this post humor, but that's metadata. Har har.) It's not a lighthearted book, I think. Waugh's writing reads as a bit angry to me, and I'm not entirely sure that I'm right about that. Maybe I'm bringing certain preconceptions about Waugh as a literary writer to the table, or maybe media manipulation, commercially expedient crisis, etc, just don't feel like much of a laughing matter in 2014. But I got this sense from A Handful of Dust too, where Waugh is unsparing in dishing out disaster in the real world outside the London social round. So, consistency in the writer or consistency in the reader?

This book is much funnier than I am, so this post was always going to be a little bit of a let-down

I really like the title of this book, let's just get that out of the way up front.

more orange in real life

Him Her Him Again The End of Him was given to me by (of course) Alice (my go-to local book blogger). I see it was published in 2007, while I was still an undergrad; so it's an extremely recent book in other words. *cough*

On the back, Melissa Banks says it "may be the funniest book I've ever read. The funniest." Well, I dunno about that quite, but it is very funny. The story is narrated in the first person by a hapless young woman who meets a fatuous philosopher in grad school at Cambridge and deludes herself for years that he loves her and isn't just using her in increasingly transparent and egotistical ways. It's a funny set up done well, with the humor coming not only from the plot and the writing (wording? you know: quotable lines and suchlike), but also from the gap you can see forming between reality and the narrator's version of events. I was slightly disappointed that the plot and the settings (Cambridge, sketch comedy shows in New York) were a bit predictable/stereotypical, but the execution is so good it's nothing I couldn't get over.

Books about grad students who turn out to be totally clueless and fail to live up to expectations and end up exasperating their supportive parents might just be a little bit too close to home for me to really gin up a lot of enthusiasm, though. I think it's safe to say that everyone has fears about their life, about awful things that could happen or that things in general might not "turn out". Obviously it's not great any time you get reminded of those fears and anxieties, but somehow it's a little more sad when you find those feelings mixing in with your enjoyment of a book, especially one that is (I can't stress this enough) really funny.

Can you even believe how depressing I'm managing to make this post about a humorous book that I'm writing on a Friday? I swear I don't do these things on purpose.

There is really no reason for this to be a gif, internet, stop showing off

But then, I suppose one of the Purposes Of Literature is to make you think about things that might be scary and to work through some of that anxiety in a fictional context. And I have to admit that while I certainly wouldn't want to be the heroine of this book, since finishing it and thinking about it, I have felt slightly more secure about not being her. Although if I really don't want to be her I should be writing my introduction instead of this blog post (whoops).

Well, there you go. Good talk, guys.

Meet my new favorite author, same as my old favorite author

Alternative post title: Judging Books by their Covers: Sometimes it Works Out

Here is a lovely book I bought at Daunt because it had an Orla Kiely print on the cover. Orla Kiely + arty reissue = catnip.

And lo, I was completely delighted by Excellent Women. Mildred Lathbury (what a name!) is an unmarried woman living in London in the late 1940s and standing on the verge of spinsterhood; the daughter of a vicar and a decided member of the churchgoing crowd, she's both satisfied and unsatisfied with life. Satisfied in that she rather likes the elements of her life and doesn't have any precise ideas about what she'd like better -- dissatisfied in that she hates to think that romance and excitement have definitely passed her by. The action of the novel comes when some very worldly people arrive in Miss Lathbury's little world and threaten to shake it all up.

Ok, that sounds like I've copied it out of Bland Book Descriptions Monthly but (a) it's accurate and (b) the real joy here is in the characters. Pym is marvelous. Her characters are so distinct, and their opinions and personalities are immediately recognizable. I found myself giggling at conversations that I could just hear. There's a scene where Mildred, discombobulated and upset, finds herself buying a lipstick called "Hawaiian Fire" to reassert her femininity in the face of spinsterhood. As she's choosing it and dealing with the saleswoman, she knows it's ridiculous and the wrong color and an embarrassing name and she just can't stop. I'm not describing this well, but it's such a great scene; and something I could totally relate to. Once I decided to treat myself to a nice dinner out to celebrate [something or other]. When I got to the restaurant, the specialty dish I had especially gone there to have wasn't on the menu anymore, so I ordered something else. Which turned out to be out of stock so I had to order something else. Whereas usually waiters are quick to suggest dessert, I had to flag down mine to take a dessert order, which she practically tried to talk me out of ("the portion is very small"). And then the whole thing cost waaaay more than I had anticipated.

Or how about the time(s) I decided to celebrate [something or other] with a mani-pedi and ended up having a utilitarian manicure in a color I wasn't crazy about? Yes indeed, nothing but the best. Poor harassed Mildred buying Hawaiian Fire lipstick is an image that is now close to my heart.

The ending threw me a little bit. It was such a charming, funny book; and one does not expect the unexpected when dealing with charming, funny books any more than with the Spanish Inquisition. I just assumed that things would sort of come together in a standard sort of chick lit way. You know what they say about the difference between Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies (or at least I think they say it: that the difference is that one ends in marriage and the other in death). And yet the book ends with Mildred poised to carry on as an Excellent Woman for the foreseeable future. I guess taken together with The Making of a Marchioness that makes two books in a row where I expected some kind of major change for the heroine that simply didn't come. Maybe my expectations have led me to overlook things -- that's happened before. But between the two I liked Excellent Women much much much much better. And certainly I won't use this as an opportunity to learn my lesson about expecting novels about women written by women to follow predictable plotlines. Pah!

I posted about this book on Facebook (back before Lent started and I was on Facebook all the time), and through the conversation discovered the international Barbara Pym Society. Oh yes! They have a website and lovely-sounding events on both sides of the Atlantic. I enjoyed reading about Pym's life and career there; she has a fascinating story. AND -- here's where the post title comes in -- they note that she's often compared to Trollope. Well then!

A Thing I Bought That I LOVE

I love Mindy Kaling, and I want to be her friend, but I have to admit that I've really been a terrible friend so far, so I guess being strangers is for the best. When I first heard about her book I was SUPER EXCITED and memorized the release date and added it to my wish list. And then it came out and I dragged my heels, not wanting to buy a hardback and not wanting to spend $12.99 on an ebook. (Considering I've bought about five £12 books since arriving in London, this is pretty hard to defend.) Finally I bought it and read it and loved it, and then I've waited weeks before writing up a blog post. You're just going to take my word that I bought and read this book with much love and excitement, because I am aware that my actions don't back that up at all.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? isn't just a book for people interested in Kaling's comedy and showbiz career; it's actually a great "girl" book. It's hard to capture this; it's emphatically not "about being a girl" much less a girl in any particular circumstances, and yet it is very much about the life experiences and choices and desires of someone who is a girl. Argh, look. I like reading about women who are happy, and Kaling comes across as really very happy. I loved her candidness about loving her parents and wanting to get married. Kaling does not come from a broken home, or even all that traumatic of a childhood. To me at least, this makes her stories feel particularly fresh and positive. Which isn't saying anything against people who don't fit that profile! I just thought it was really refreshing to read something so un-cynical.

When I say the book is smart, I mean to say that Kaling is an excellent writer. It's clear that she's being very open about the things she wants to be open about, without giving things away that she doesn't want to give away. For instance, as she has described the book herself... somewhere... it's not a memoir but rather a series of comedic essays about various aspects of (her) life. She talks about sex and dating and so on but doesn't actually blab about her love life. The book is very entertaining and satisfying, and there is no doubt that every bit of it was chosen and planned and crafted. That's some mad talent.*

And of course it's funny. It's very funny. It was a bright and cheerful light in the midst of my flat-hunting. Things like this:

Sports movies had brainwashed me into the belief that when the chips are down the most, that is when success is the most inevitable.

Right?! The stories are really well told, the pictures have hilarious captions, the humorous lists are appropriately humorous -- it's good stuff.

Possibly the best way I can summarize this book is by saying that I would recommend it to people who didn't know or care who Mindy Kaling is. Even if you've never seen the US The Office and are unfamiliar with comic actors on US television shows, you will enjoy the vast majority of this book because it's just generally a really fun read. And completely worth the $12.99 for the ebook. In fact I will probably buy the hardback when I get back to the states.

* I really didn't want to play Showbiz Book Showdown with this one and Tina Fey's Bossypants, but this is the area where I really felt Bossypants fell down. It was a good book, don't get me wrong, but I finished it thinking, "so you can be great at writing TV but not so great at writing books, interesting."

Confession: I'm still not entirely sure I get the title

Three magazines are not enough to occupy someone sleepless over the Atlantic, and I actually ended up finishing this book during the flight. Before I talk about the book itself, just look at the cover design.

This is part of the New York Review of Books series (collection), and they always have such pretty design. I particularly love the colors: the dark jungle green combined with the toothpaste green. Plus that sassy little naked girl! That's fun for a public place.

I was drawn to this book because it's about an American girl having a grand time in Paris. Look, I've never had a thing for Paris (something that Andie from The Devil Wears Prada and I have in common besides our alma mater) - and I have really never been attracted to being a starving artist or a starving anything. So I had some trepidation going in that the book might be tedious on that count. Nevertheless, I wanted to read about someone having fun in spite of my demonstrated hatred of fun.

It is indeed about a young college grad who has moved to the left bank and desperately wants "to live". This might be terribly cliche but it's the mid-1950s, so it feels fairly fresh. Sally Jay (what an awful American name, huh?) is kind of an adorable mess, and somehow manages not to be annoying even as she's trying to live life to the fullest in an almost mechanical way. By which I mean, she does this or that because she thinks it would be "really living," not because she has any particular goal in mind.

It's funny and cute and engaging and then it takes the most perfect dark turn that I don't even want to tell you about. I didn't see it coming and then once it arrived it just all fell together. Nevertheless, there's a light, happy ending without too much heartbreak, and really it's just fantastic.

I really enjoyed this book, and what's more, the very short introduction and author's note before and after were actually enjoyable and illuminating! How often does that happen?

I don't know how much it helped me get energized about my own trip; I don't plan to be an impoverished actress or to pick up any married lovers. As a matter of fact I'd be very happy NOT to follow in any of Sally Jay's footsteps. I know, I'm so boring. But it's a fun read and I strongly recommend it.

Where is my "Don't Panic" Kindle cover, capitalism?

No, I had not read The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy before, but having practically grown up on a Lord of the Rings message board, I sort of felt like I had. Towels, "42", mice and dolphins, you know. And then I saw the movie version in college with a group of Turkish grad students (an appropriately weird set of circumstances, I thought). But used bookstore to the stars (i.e. me and Alice) Open Books had a nifty omnibus edition of the "trilogy in four parts" for a bargain $7 so here we are.

For the record, I liked the movie well enough, and I haven't come across anything in the book(s) to change that impression. For the most part my reaction to the book(s) -- I've just finished The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and started in on Life, the Universe, and Everything -- has been to ramble along genially, thinking "heh" and "I see what you did there" at intervals. In short, I am not one of those people for whom Hitch Hiker's Guide is a touchstone, change-your-life book.

But! That's not to say I'm not enjoying it. And certainly not to say there aren't moments that make me laugh awkwardly in public places. For instance:

 "We have a thing on Earth..." began Arthur. "Had," corrected Zaphod. "... called tact. Oh never mind"

Ha, very sly.

Also:

One of the major problems encountered in time travel... is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. ... Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up.

Yes, yes, so far so wacky.  Adams is full of these little digressions. But then the whole thing just blossoms when a few paragraphs later you're suddenly getting this:

In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at a table and eat (willan on-eat) sumptuous meals whilst watching (willing watchen) the whole of creation explode around them.

 Ahhh! Genius!

I think your tolerance level for these digressions probably shapes your enjoyment of the book to a great degree. I mean, in a way, the whole book is a series of digressions loosely hung on a plot. Being a very plot-driven reader, my tolerance for all these little wanderings (woo, synonym?) is naturally pretty low. (This is ironic because my mind is always going on digressions.) So while sometimes I find myself skipping ahead a little, I'm sure there are other people who eat them all up with a spoon. But even so, it's generally not too long until I find myself in the middle of an aside that is as funny as the one above, or, cue another example:

It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85 per cent of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme...

Medium is an interesting issue with the Hitch Hiker's Guide, and it occurs to me that the things that I really enjoy tend to be things that are fairly textually based. I'm assuming the jynnan tonnyx joke never turned up on the radio! although I guess the verb tenses would be just as funny. I can't put my finger on why, but I think I probably would enjoy the digressions in general more in the radio format.

Anyway, I'm convinced that the Ultimate Question is "How many songs about rainbows are there?"

"Waiting on" Wednesday: MINDY KALING MINDY KALING

[Oops, forgot the link: there's a meme here by this name, which I sought out basically just so I could gush over this book. Yeah, I'm getting the hang of this "blog" thing.]

Guys, I am super excited for Mindy Kaling's book. I can't explain it. Well, yes I can: Mindy Kaling is hilarious. Any woman who would make Michael Scott say "I like waking up to the smell of bacon -- sue me" is a-okay in my book.

Plus! The title!

Kaling used to write a blog called "Things I Bought That I Love" (which she has now revived on her new website) which was really my first contact with her solo work. As an homage, I would like therefore to offer you today:

Julie's Things That I Bought That I Love: AndesNature Cabernet Crema Antioxidante

So I have to take public transportation to the church I attend, which means that every Sunday I either come charging in late or end up spending a half an hour browsing in the CVS across the street. I'm just paranoid enough to think the employees know that I'm loitering, so I feel the need to wander around a lot, looking thoughtful even though I'm not actually paying any attention to what's on the shelf in front of me. Which is how I ended up in the "Hispanic Care" section this past weekend, which is where I saw this:

This facial moisturizer smells like delicious grape Jolly Ranchers, which is a good thing because if it smelled like wine, you might find yourself in the middle of what can only be called "hijinx". It's got a mousse-y sort of texture, thick and rich but also light and whipped. It sinks in really quickly, which is basically all I ask for when it comes to facial cremes. And it's from Chile! Let's face it, everything is better when it comes from another country.
Get it: in the vaguely racist aisle of Walgreens or CVS.

Twitter is for twits

I don't remember when I started Barchester Towers, but it feels like a long time ago and I've milked several posts from it, so when I finished I felt the need to take on something quick and easy. Enter Grace Dent's How to Leave Twitter - because what could be quicker and easier than Twitter?

This book was strongly recommended to me by Alice. Oh, yeah, she wrote a blog post in which she strongly recommended it to all of you, too, but she also mentioned it to me ("Dude. Read How to Leave Twitter. Do it.") at least twice in real life. Alice is my Twitter Pal, a.k.a. one of the few people who actually talks to me on Twitter, so it seemed appropriate to give in. Thus:

 

Anyone who has succumbed to the lures of Twitter really ought to read this book. It's hilarious. As far as Dent is concerned, Twitter is for aimless chatter and spying on other people's lives, and that's precisely why it's awesome. She has no time for your sanctimonious concerns about privacy and shortening attention spans, much less -- spare us -- your social media strategies.

I'm a really boring tweeter -- I think to myself a lot, so Twitter ends up being an extension of this, with lots of "got to put on clothes" and "when will I learn not to take this bus" -- so I'm not in the position to criticize anyone, but thank goodness Grace Dent is. She goes through not only the various stages of Twitter usage, from newbs to full-blown addicts, but also the various breeds of insufferable tweeters and their insufferable tweets. You will recognize these people, and also the withdrawl Dent writes about in her steps for quitting.

You have not left Twitter if you pop back on to Twitter to tweet about your success.

Guilty as charged; whenever I decide to take time off from the internet I almost instantly think of ten witty comments about the situation, which totally ruins it. I said that anyone on Twitter should read this, but really anyone who finds it difficult to take the high road about social media ought to enjoy it. I am neck deep in social media and I have no one but myself to blame. I lived on message boards and AIM in high school, so I guess it's not surprising that I have a higher tolerance to "living online" than other people, but it seems like more and more of my friends are becoming once a week Facebookers, holding themselves aloft from Zuckerberg's increasingly troubling cesspool of personal data. I know, I know, I know, but meanwhile I can't help myself; I'm Facebooking, I'm Twittering, and yes, as someone accused me the other day, I am indeed Google-plus-ing.

Dent (no fan of Facebook, to be fair) blasts through this uneasiness, proudly declaring her love of the Twitter format and whatever creepiness it might involve. Have I mentioned it's a funny book? It's a really funny book, and it totally makes me jealous of her obviously very fun Twitter life.

It's rather menacing, isn't it? 'Hello, I'm FOLLOWING you,' you're whispering electronically. 'Don't be alarmed. I've decided to silently observe your life for my own personal gratification.'

 I especially liked her description of "Desktop Multi-application Spiralling Circle of Hell Syndrome" which basically is what happens to me whenever I try to do more than two hours of work in a row.

One more addition: so I said anyone who is on any social media should read this, but actually anyone interested in the issue of women's voices in the media, or in the democratizing potential of the internet should probably have a look, at least at the chapter about women on Twitter. It's funny and fascinating. Dent writes that when she joined Twitter she discovered

millions of women being sharp, wise, practical, amusing. At the age of 35 I felt like someone had opened a gate into a fantastic secret garden full of gobby Amazonians.

She gives a funny critique of women's magazines that feels ancient but is sadly still very on-the-nose, and runs down the (British) TV schedule to point out the lack of the kind of honest female voices that are present in abundance on Twitter. Gender on the internet is always an interesting subject, and Dent's testimony (which includes some really eye-opening examples of how print editors have edited her writing to be "more feminine") is especially so.

I am only human; and while I have a Twitter account I can't help but have low expectations of a book about Twitter. This one, though, is great, and as I hope I've conveyed successfully, it's not "just" a book about Twitter. It's also super-funny and a great commute read.

Friday bonus post!

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 Here is the most super-fantastic sci-fi/fantasy flowchart. It's so good. In high school, sf/f was my genre of choice, and I would totally have wanted this as a poster (I might still). Even if you're not into it, you'll like this because it's that very best of internet things, a Sassy Flowchart. Here's my favorite bit:

"I shall require at least ten" -- guilty as charged.