This book was pretty funny in spots. I think Sarah Palin’s biography might be funnier.

2.5/5
288 pages

When I started reading The Art of the Heist by Myles J. Connor, I was super excited (and a bit dismayed) when he started talking about robbing the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston. I *loved* visiting both the Isabella Gardner Museum & the Museum of Fine Arts on our recent trip to Boston, and gah, it takes a real creep to steal art from places people love. Although the story of how Myles & company stole a Rembrandt from the MFA was super ballsy – they basically just paid admission, walked straight to the painting, took it off the wall and walked away with it in hand.The book was an okay read – a little dreary in parts and with far more detail about bank robberies and murders than I would have liked…but hey, a life of crime isn’t just going to include the victimless crimes, I guess.

304 pages
2.5/5

A teenage girl disappears from a small town, and her friends explore every possibility – was she kidnapped? did she run away? was she kidnapped and then did she run away? Each possibility is explored in detail, even as the teenagers grow into adults and have children of their own. I gotta be honest, I didn’t really enjoy reading this book. I did enjoy the philosophical bits about growing old and memory and experience – but I didn’t really like the exploration of all possibilities. Maybe you’ll like it better than I did.

2.5/5
256 pages

I first devoured Ishmael during my college hippie-ish years, when I was feeling particularly disenfranchised with the world. A few days ago I was talking with my brother-in-law about the teacher/gorilla, and decided to read it again before loaning it to him. The book is essentially a telepathic conversation between a wise gorilla and a student who has answered an ad to “save the world”. Ishmael (the gorilla) teaches the student a different way of looking at the world; that is, the difference between the Takers (present day culture that believes that the world was made for man) and the Leavers (“primitive” culture that believe that man was made for the world). While I still believe in the books philosophical premise, my impressions of the book have changed as I have aged. There are still some “aha!” moments, especially near the end of the book. But overall I found the book a little boring, wordy, and not as much fun to read as it was when I was 20.

2.5/5
263 pages

This book was hilarious – at least the first half of it was, anyway. I read most of the first half of the book to Emily, as she was trying to go to sleep, and we laughed hysterically at the adventures of the thunderbolt kid and his perception of growing up in the 1950s in Des Moines, Iowa.

My own personal experience with Des Moines, Iowa was also pretty hysterical; around 1998 my boyfriend & I were driving back to Indiana from Montana and somehow got kicked out of a state park where we were trying to camp without paying. Well, we had cash but no change, and didn’t want to leave a $20 bill to cover a $5 camping charge. We ended up in Des Moines, and stopped at a gas station to ask about a cheap hotel. We got completely lost trying to find it (even though Des Moines isn’t that big; we were exhausted). This was long before the age of GPS and only rich folks had cell phones, so I asked the most reliable source of information I could find: a cop in a Waffle House parking lot. We asked him where the “Casa Blanca Hotel” was. He looked at us kinda funny but gave us directions. When we got there, we found out the hotel charged by the hour!

Anyway, this book is much funnier than my story.

270 pages
2.5/5 because it is not so funny at the end

This book was an enjoyable read if I didn’t think too hard. It is about two boys named Wes Moore who grew up blocks from each other, raised by single mothers. The author is a Rhodes scholar; the other Wes Moore is serving a life sentence in prison. The question of the book is – how do these boys grow up in similar circumstances with such drastically different results?

The answer the author seems to be looking for is obvious: The two men did not grow up in similar environments. The author Wes Moore lost his father from a tragic illness at a young age, and his mom moved in with her parents – there was a strong family support system even though his father was absent. He went to an expensive private school, and when he started getting into “trouble”, he was sent to an expensive military school. The other Wes Moore never knew his father. His mother was an addict. His older brother was involved in the drug game, and the other Wes Moore soon followed in his older brother’s footsteps.

I did find the interviews with “the other Wes Moore” interesting, but as the book went along those interviews got shorter and less frequent and the book became purely autobiographical. Still, it was an easy read.

256 pages
2.5/5

Sometimes I add books to my library cart that I don’t really want to read, that I would never pay money for, but that somehow I feel compelled to try to read anyways. This is one of those books. I guess for what it is (part self-help, part memoir), it is alright. Nothing groundbreaking. Funny in places. Not funny in others.

2.5/5
224 pages

Picked up this book because I saw it on a reading list, and I had to take out two separate extensions from the library on it. Not for lack of inspiration – indeed, Paul Farmer M.D. is the man I wish my (non-existent) children would take after – but not exactly a book to read for pleasure or comfort. (Of course, there’s not much going on in Haiti these days for pleasure or comfort, so there’s that). Anyway, it seemed like the kind of book I should finish, so I did, but I didn’t really enjoy it.

2.5/5
352 pages

Yeah, I know. I laughed most of the way through Twilight the movie, and here I am a year later reading the book. So, it wasn’t great. (But it wasn’t terrible). And yes, I’m reading the 2nd book…because how can I truly judge a book if I am reading after having seen it’s truly awful movie?

2.5/5
544 pages

Book #5 was “The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai. I should have known by the title that this book was going to be utterly depressing, but I had high expectations anyway. The book follows a few key characters and the stories of their past and present (and by assumption, they all have quite bleak futures ahead of them). The writing is very descriptive and lovely at times, but mostly just depressing.

384 pages
2.5 out of 5