I wish the lecture wasn't the last...

A whole month has gone by without a book review. Arielle and I are slackers and we apologize. She is busy with business school, and I’m just lazy. But we’re going to try and revive this thing, starting with some of the books that I’ve read in the last 2 months. Yeah that’s right, 2 months. I’m way behind. Hopefully I can remember what I read!

After watching the YouTube video of Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture”, crying in front of the computer, and then reading more about him, his family, and his illness, I ran out to buy the book that he wrote, based off of the lecture.

The Last Lecture is pretty much like one of those happy little coffee table books that you buy to make you smile, like The World According to Mr. Rogers, which I LOVE. Except there’s so much more to it. Maybe because Randy Pausch isn’t a fictional character. Or maybe because what he writes is so hopeful, and just so honest, that you can’t help but to love it and feel good after reading it.

Each chapter basically touches upon what he spoke about at his lecture, with a little more detail and personal stories about his family thrown in. I remember from the lecture that he told the crowd how he didn’t want to go into details about his family, because he didn’t want to break down on stage. So instead, he chose to share his memories in a more controlled environment. The little anecdotes that Pausch shares in his book are wonderful, because they aren’t all happy little memories. In order to emphasize the points that he makes, he shares the good, the bad, and the ugly. And seems to do it with humor the entire time.

I unfortunately learned right when I read the book that Randy Pausch had finally succumbed to his battle with cancer, and I immediately thought of his wife now raising their three young children alone. But luckily, Pausch leaves such a legacy with his Last Lecture and book, that I can’t imagine his kids not knowing how their father felt about them.

And if you haven't, watch the video. It's worth it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Kids suck. Especially when you're overweight.

I have a friend from college who went to work at Camp Shane one summer. You may know Camp Shane from an MTV special that they had years ago. Regardless, Camp Shane is a fat camp. Much like the one that Stephanie Klein spends her summers at in her memoir Moose.

I spent 8 years at summer camp also, and I really enjoyed Klein's honesty and abrasiveness that she used in describing her camp years. Camp was a wild time, and Klein spares us nothing. If teenage sexuality was rampant at your camp, it was certainly wild at fat camp. Which, as Klein proclaims, was most likely because the playing field was even for the first time in these kid's lives.

Klein doesn't gloss over the BS that fills a kid's life when they're forced into a situation with other kids. (School included.) Camp, although awesome, is a major drama fest, and we're spared nothing about it in Moose.

And although she got kicked out of camp for teaching other girls how to throw up (which she was taught by another camper), Klein eventually lost the weight that she needed. It was refreshing to see that Klein didn't use losing weight as a happily-ever-after crutch, because she still struggled and was honest about it.

I mean, the whole reason for this book was that she needed to gain weight for her pregnancy, and nearly had a panic attack when she was told to do so by her doctor. Luckily, she got over her fear of becoming fat again, and gave birth to her healthy twins.

Another case of parents screwing up their children...or maybe this ones the child's fault.

So little time, so many memoirs. Seriously if you haven't been able to tell from this blog (when I actually remember to post in it), I am a sucker for memoirs. I probably read them more than any fiction novel, and in recent years, they've begun to fill my bookshelves. (I really should look into getting a library card again.)

I don't remember putting Who Do You Think You Are? into my Amazon cart, but once it was there I figured, why not? Alyse Myers was born and raised in Queens, the product of a working class Jewish family. She was a Daddy's Girl, even though her father disappeared for days at a time, and often fought with her mother. Never close with her younger sisters, Alyse doesn't know what to do with herself when her father dies. She understands that he had an illness, but doesn't understand who that strange woman in his hospital room was.

As time goes on, Alyse realizes that even though she loved her father more, that he was not perfect. However, she still is not close at all with her mother, a woman who she considers to be slightly off kilter, and who will dole out love only to take it back in an instant.

Alyse finally makes her escape from her family by working hard to get accepted to one of NYC's specialized public high schools, and from there goes on to City College, where she finally moves out.

It's after this time that we kind of fast forward through Alyse's adulthood, through her first post college jobs, marriage, and child. And as her mother becomes ill, it comes up that maybe her volatile relationship with her mother was something that only Alyse experienced. Her sisters say that she was a good mother, and her husband is smitten with her. Was Alyse just a horrible brat, or someone that just did not get along the same way with her mother as her sisters did?

As I came to the end of the book, I was confused to whether Alyse's mother was an outright loon, or just someone deeply affected by the relationship between her firstborn child and her philandering husband. Did she have a deep vendetta towards her daughter because she was close with the man who cheated on her, and that's why Alyse's sisters did not feel the same about their mother?

Who knows. In the end I was reminded of The Glass Castle, and the relationship that Jeannette Walls had with her parents. Both explosive, and both basically screwing up their children in one way or another.

I Could Live Without the Neuroses

I've done Internet dating before. In fact, I met my boyfriend online, although not through a dating site. So this book definitely intrigued me, especially since the main character writes dating profiles for other people, when she has never done Internet dating herself. Oh but she had practice writing profiles for dogs to be adopted... that's right.

I have little patience for characters with too many neuroses, and Nora, of Five Things I Can't Live Without, is definitely one of those characters. She thinks she's stuck in her meta-life, which she has determined as the syndrome of not living in the moment, but internally commenting and questioning the experience as it's happening. I've determined it as being crazypants.

Regardless, after Nora quits her job writing profiles for puppies, she offers to write a profile for her best friend, and then decides to take it on as a career. After posting an ad on Craigslist, it's a wonder that she didn't meet any crazies. (Cause you know, that's what would have happened in real life.)

The book goes back and forth between Nora's neuroses and her trying to jump start her new found career. She also experiences a slip up with one of her clients, where she wants to kiss him, but doesn't. She still feels the need to tell her boyfriend, and after that confrontation, realizes that maybe she should stop being crazy, and start living in the now.

Holly Shumas does a good job with the storyline, and I was very intrigued by the profiles of each person that Nora creates. And even though her character was a tad annoying, by the end of the book, Nora definitely became a bearable person.

This book's title has no significance and thus I'm matching it with an unimportant title for my post

The other day I decided that as much as it would have surely put me to sleep, my statistics textbook wasn't going to cut it as far as bedtime reading. So I grabbed a book from my roommate's collection, and came out with Veil of Roses, by Laura Fitzgerald.

Our heroine is Tamila, a 27 year-old Iranian girl (woman, excuse me) who has come to the United States with a mission. She has to find a husband. ASAP. She has a 3 month tourist visa and if she doesn't find a nice Iranian man to marry her in that time frame, she'll have to go back to Iran for good. Not ideal.

The story is an interesting one, as we get to see our wonderful hedonistic society through the eyes of someone who has been so far removed from even things as simple as not having to have your head covered when you go out in public. Tamila has only a basic grasp of English, and Fitzgerald uses a simple writing style to help portray this (at least I hope so - otherwise, she sort of writes like a 3rd grader but let's give her the benefits of the doubt okay? Thanks). Not only are we exposed to the United States through a foreigner's perspective, but we get an insider's view of what it's like living in a world much more oppressive than our own (and boy are we thankful we don't live there!).

The book is a super fast read, as I went through it in less than 24 hours. My main issue with it is that it is pathetically predictable. If you combined the predictability of every awful chick flick movie and every Disney animated classic, you might understand exactly how unsurprising Veil of Roses is. But hey, some people don't like surprises!

So I think I might actually mean it now when I say that I might not be reviewing any books for awhile (sniff sniff). School wears me out to the extent that I no longer need a book to help me fall asleep at night, and my free time for leisure reading is such that it is nonexistent. But you never know when I might be able to squeeze a book in, so stay tuned, any of you who are out there! (Seriously, do we even have any readers? Who knows).

Super Crunchers, to the rescue!

Okay, when I said I likely wasn't going to be reviewing any other books for school, I apparently lied. Because here I am again! Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres, was one of my summer assignments for school, and it was interesting enough for me to tell you all about it! Get pumped, if you aren't already.

The book is essentially about how more and more areas in all walks of life can be (and are being) affected by data-driven analyses. Super crunchers, as the people (mostly economists) processing the numbers are called, are concerned with being able to use information from past events to predict future ones. Not a data fiend? Does this sound boring and not even remotely applicable to your life? Think again, dear friends.

Even heard of the site eHarmony? Of course you have. eHarmony is one of the many brainchildren of super crunching. People have studied and quantified the many aspects of personality and how those aspects interact with the personalities of others. The data was then used to determine how to match people based on the information they provide to the website in the introductory survey. And while it obviously doesn't work for everyone, eHarmony does have a pretty impressive success rate.

Still not convinced? Would you believe it if I told you that a computer program exists that can, when given a list of a patient's symptoms, give a diagnosis with a higher success rate of accuracy than the average (or above average) MD? Tis the truth. Or what about a program that can beat a team of legal experts in predicting the outcome of court trials based on past information about other cases in those circuits and with those judges? I could go on and on with examples, but the fact remains that patterns exist in more areas than maybe we want to admit, and that sometimes analyzing a set of data really can tell the future in ways that humans can't.

If any of this sounds familiar, it's because you've probably read Freakonomics. This is kind of like that, only better! Freakonomics spent what I thought was far too much time on subject matter that didn't interest me (hello, sumo wrestling). Super Crunchers, on the other hand, was legitimately interesting, from beginning to end. If only the rest of my reading for school would be like this. I don't remain hopeful about that one.

This is a good ass book

I won't lie to you - Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, is an intimidating book. At over 900 pages, it's the kind of book I would tend to ignore when perusing Barnes and Noble for something to read (just to give you the feel of how large it is, I put in this extremely large picture of the cover. Are you intimidated? Of course you are). A friend recommended it to me, and because I take book recommendations pretty seriously, I reluctantly picked up the book, considering it my arm workout for the day, and began reading.

The basic premise of the book is that our protagonist has escaped from a maximum security prison in Australia and escaped to Bombay (yes, I know it's Mumbai now, but it wasn't at the time) and pretty much has all sorts of crazy shenanigans happen to him there. Whatever you could possibly want from this book, it's there. Romance? Got it. War? Check. Drug-induced haze? Oh yes. Getting thrown into Indian prison for months and never knowing why? A foreigner joining the Bombay mafia? Hugging a live bear? Complete and total astonishment at how this person is still alive despite the fact that, considering the terrible things he's lived through, he should have died about 800 times already? That's all there too.

Roberts has a true talent for characterization, and we get a great sense of the relationships he manages to build up in Bombay and the crazy people he meets along the way. Perhaps one of the most amazing things about this book is that it's a TRUE STORY. And I mean that in the way that James Frey's A Million Little Pieces is a true story. It's almost all true except there are probably a few minor details in there that are fabricated and now the book technically has to be classified as fiction.

I'm really at a loss for how else to describe this book. There are ups and downs and lefts and rights and some of it is so outlandish that you have to wonder how one person can go through so much suffering (there are good times too, of course) and still have the good humor to tell the tale. This is an absolute must-read, and those 900+ pages fly by faster than you'd like them to.

I should also note that Shantaram is being made into a movie, coming out in 2009. Johnny Depp is playing the main character and I couldn't be happier about the actor choice. You know no one other than Depp can play such a versatile person. I look forward to it, and you should too!