Fast Reads

Recommended Reading: Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, by Maria Semple

/ Carolyn O / 1 Comment

If you love Arrested Development, you’ll love this book. And there’s no way it won’t be made into a movie in a hot minute.

Maria Semple wrote for (perhaps still writes for?) AD, and her hilarious send-up of Seattle upper-middle-class culture both makes me want to move there and also makes me feel better that I don’t live there already.

I’d like to tip my hat to my friend Katie, who mentioned a few weeks ago that she was reading a book she took out from the library, at which I thought: “Hey! The library! Not just for Elmo videos!”

So, the next time we went in for Elmo videos, which are next to the new (read: 2012 and forward) releases, I picked the book with the great title and decided to run with it.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is nearly epistolary, with occasional interpolations by the narrator, Bernadette’s daughter, Bee, and that alone makes my heart sing. I love a good epistolary novel. The Coquette, one of the earliest American novels (1797, if my first year in grad school serves me well), is a great read, and if you haven’t read Griffin and Sabine, go immediately to your nearest bookseller and take it home with you.

Anyway. I don’t want to give away the plot, as usual, because, as the title indicates, it’s also something of a detective novel. Positively delightful, fast-paced, witty, and with enough talk about Antarctica that I heartily recommend it for the beach this summer.

Fast Read: Matthew Quick, Silver Linings Playbook

/ Carolyn O / Leave a comment

My husband and I have been out together, sans bebe, a grand total of once this year, and it was to see Silver Linings Playbook. We were surprised that Bradley Cooper can really act (though we shouldn’t have been — he’s hilarious in Wet Hot American Summer) and agreed that Jennifer Lawrence is pretty rad.  As we left the theater, we talked about how we felt like we’d seen a good movie; not a flick, not an art-house piece (we like those too), but a good solid movie.

So we bought the book.

I zipped through it in about two and a half hours on Saturday night (can you tell we have a toddler?). It’s different from the movie, of course; Pat Peoples is more disturbed and more interesting the book, but I think the other characters—particularly Pat’s father and Tiffany—are fleshed out more in the movie.

Still, the book is an engaging picture of mental illness and the glories and lows of fandom, with some very funny passages to boot. Lit geeks will love Pat’s short reviews of classic American novels. My favorite:

Maybe Puritans were simply dumber than modern people, but I cannot believe how long it took those seventeenth-century Bostonians to figure out that their spiritual leader knocked up the local hussy. [. . .] I know we were assigned Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter back in high school, and if I had known the book was filled with so much sex and espionage, I might have read it when I was sixteen. (Matthew Quick, Silver Linings Playbook, 57)

A quick read, with short chapters; might be perfect for beach season, especially if you’re taking turns chasing a toddler.