TagBooks

Books and Bachelor Villains: A Perfect Combination

Courtney Robertson’s book I Didn’t Come Here to Make Friends: Confessions of a Reality Show Villain was released yesterday. While I confess I’m only about a quarter of the way through, so far it has been hilarious and scandalous.

The best part? It was a perfect match for two of my favorite things, books and The Bachelor! Trashy reading about someone’s actual life that I just can’t put down? Absolutely. Worth reading? Absolutely.

My favorite quotes are best summed up by this buzzfeed article:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateaurthur/bachelor-book-courtney-robertson-ben-flajnik

I’m sure she’s raking in the dough from the large Bachelor fan base that is desperate to get a glimpse into the strange mind of one of the most notorious villains the show has ever seen. If you haven’t watched Ben F’s season of The Bachelor you probably won’t enjoy the book. If you have watched that season, buy it (or check it out from the library if you don’t want to financially support your least favorite Bachelor contestant)!

100 Books

I have slowly been plugging through the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die (combined list from 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012). Recently I’ve been reading more things not on the list, but I finally reached 100 list books!

I didn’t plan to do this, but book #100 was The Forsyte Saga. This is one of those long books, well really multiple books, that took me months to complete since it kept getting tossed aside in favor of other things. Every few weeks I’d remember to pick it up again, only to get distracted by a trip to the library.

Six months later I have finally finished The Forsyte Saga, book #100 on the list! Which means there is a series in my Netflix future :-)

 

If you’re interested, here’s the full list of 1001 books: http://www.1morechapter.com/projects/1001-list/

 

Quote of the Day

“When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book.” – Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

This is supposed to be good? A book review.

We’ve all been there. Whether in high school English, in college, or while reading for fun everyone has come across a ‘classic’ they hated but every literary critic and high school teacher seems to love.

I came across another one of those books in my 1001 Books to Read Before You Die journey. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer is the story of an American who returns to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather’s life during WWII. At least that’s what a normal review will tell you. I will tell you it was the story of an author trying too hard to be funny through language, resulting in dull monologues about nothing but repetitive words just for the author’s pleasure.

Ok, so there were good parts of the book too. I just barely convinced myself to finish it after 4 months of periodically picking it up, and the end was much much better than the first 3/4 of the book. That, however, does not make the book good. I don’t know why any literary critic who actually respects the fact that traditionally books have a plot that isn’t EXTREMELY easily summarized in a sentence or two (read: nothing else happens but the author playing with language) would like this book. But, alas, this book has received some of the highest reviews of any of the 1001 books.

I’m sure I’ll come across more of these – books I expect to be good based on the plot summary and reviews, but I end up hating. This was one of Foer’s first works so maybe the others will be good, but I found this one to be a literary critic’s dream and my worst nightmare.