What I Read Last Week

This was a challenging reading week, but I still managed to finish a book and read 7 other books!

I finished reading The Long Winter. I shared my thought on this book here.

Confession time: when I first sat down to read this book, I wasted a few minutes trying to wipe a smudge off the cover before realizing that it was actually supposed to be smoke from the cupcake candles. I haven't felt that ridiculous since that time I was on a cruise and I loudly said, "Oh no, my foot is bleeding," and then I realized it was melted chocolate.

Three Wishes is a novel about triplets who have a love-hate relationship. Throughout the book, they alternate between being almost unnaturally close and wanting to rip each other's hair out. The book was full of unexpected twists and turns, with a slightly unrealistic but still satisfying ending. I didn't love this book, but I did like it. I think it was worth reading once, but I'm not saving it for the Favorites shelf.

The title of this book pretty much says it all. This true story of a woman was misdiagnosed and then spent years trying to get a correct diagnosis really hit home for me. I spent 12 years trying to get a diagnosis for my mystery illness. The book made me flash back to some bad doctors from the past; the one who wore theme outfits (who would have thought they made sunflower headbands in grown-up size), the one who switched my test results with someone else's, the one who tried to explain to me what a vegetarian is as if having a chronic illness made me unable to access my brain cells, the one who pretty much broke up with me (she actually gave me the "I can't give you what you need" speech.) But it also made me grateful for the good ones, the ones who haven't given up no matter how challenging the task.

I think this book would be very helpful to someone who is struggling to get a diagnosis for their health problems. And it would be helpful if you know/love someone in that situation because it could give you some insight into what that person is going through. But I'm not sure if would be very interesting to anyone else. Don't get me wrong, it was a well written book, but it's not the most interesting subject in the world.

And now for the moment of shame. The fluffy celebrity books that helped me get to my reading goal for the week were:

I read all 4 of Tori Spelling's book over the coarse of 2 days. That's a lot of crazy to fit into a 48 hour span of time. Spelling's first book, STori Telling was entertaining, as far as fluffy celebrity memoirs go. It covers the first 34 years of her life, and considering the first 34 years included; an insanely wealthy childhood, a long-standing feud with her Mom, her rise to D-list fame, a marriage, a divorce, a cheating scandal, another marriage, and a baby, there was plenty of material for her to write about. Books 2 and 3 were a completely pointless waste of time. Book 2 covers the period from when she was 34 until she was 37, and book 3 covers the year and a half of her life after that. Yeah, that's right, an entire book that covers an 18 month span of time in her life. The result: there was so little for her to write about that there are entire chapters about completely pointless moments in her life. For example, there's a 3 paragraph discussion of her obsession with how many twitter followers she has, frequent talk about her bowel movements and her kids bowels movements (wish I was kidding about that, but nope), endless complaints about how she spends so much more time with her kids than her husband does, constant talk about what a hands-on Mom and homemaker she is (sandwiched in between the references to her housekeeper, and 3 nannies, of course.) Book 4 was a little better than 2 and 3 because a little more time had passed in her life before she wrote it, so there were actually things to write about (like her dangerous pregnancy with baby # 4.)

The overall impression I got after reading all 4 books in a row is that the only way to enjoy these books is to approach them the way you would a reality show, with the understanding that a lot of what happens is fake (because every book contradicts the one before it) and that most of the people you will encounter will be so sickening you wouldn't ever choose to spend time with them in real life. The books are riddled with lies and half-truths and moments of total delusion. And they are filled with dysfunction that Spelling goes through the motions of pretending she is fixing, while really doing nothing to actually make her life better.

In short: the books were entertaining and amusing in places but then there were other parts of the books, like when she's discussing the pictures she takes of her bowel movements where I was reading it and thinking, This is not only my literary low point. It might also be the low point of my entire life.

I was hoping to finish out the reading book with something that wouldn't make me feel like I was banging my head against a brick wall, and for awhile it looked like this book would help me accomplish that. The plot of this book is really hard to describe, so I'm going to let the synopsis on the back of the book do the work for me:
At the request of a major pharmaceutical company, Hector goes in search of a brilliant scientist who has disappeared after developing a molecule with the power to make people fall in love.
There were elements of the book that reminded me of the movie Down With Love, where everyone is doing such a good job of double crossing one another that it's hard to keep up with who has the upper hand. I love books/movies like that. I was on the edge of my seat, never sure what was going to happen next. I raced through the book to see how it was going to end, and then it fizzled out into nothing. And when I say "fizzled out into nothing" I mean that literally. There was no ending. The author gets to the end and says he's not sure how the 4 main characters' stories end. I know he did this to try to make us want to read the next book in the series, but what a load of crap. At least tie the story up somehow. Give us something that makes us feel like the last 265 pages were worth out time. The upside here is that no matter what I read next, it will have to be more satisfying. As long as it has an ending (even if it's a terrible one) it will still feel great compared to an author telling us that they're not sure what happens next.