Review: Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere

Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere by Lauren Leto

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This book made me feel like a bad English major. I only recognized about half of the authors and titles that Leto mentions (one bit of advice is to keep paper and pen with you to take notes on all the books she references). It might be the fact that the vast majority of the books are "contemporary literature" and I haven't really read "literature" published in the last 50 years or so. My literary education focused on eras before modernism, probably because I like a linear plot and I am not apologizing for that.

It's just that after reading Judging a Book by Its Lover, I feel that there is so much I missed and now have seriously make up for lost time. However, I've gotten used to reading fun books, or commercial genre fiction (lots of paranormal fiction at the moment), so I'm out of practice with that kind of reading. I've been meaning to stop reading such fluffy books (usually with quite a bit of sex), and start on books that really make me think, but again I place some blame on my English and liberal arts classes for the sheer amount of reading they forced me to do. After all that scholarly reading I just wanted to turn my mind off, and thus fluff books and tv took over.

So I will make a resolution to start reading books that make me think. I'll start slowly and intersperse them with other types of reading as I have wanted to get back into more epic fantasy and there are quite a few nonfiction books that I think look interesting. Let's see how this goes.

On other notes Leto is pithy and acerbic at times while warm and touching at others. I'm sure that her insights into the authors and books would be more meaningful if I had read more of them, but at the same time she is often a little too critical for my taste.



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DIY: Pinterest Halloween Costume

I'm assuming that most of you know what Pinterest is (Hello, to all my fellow Pinners!), if you don't it's a treasure trove of ideas about crafts, recipes, awesome photos, tributes to the bastions of geekdom, and anything else you could possibly think of; basically, it's one of the biggest time sucks on the Internet. Anyhoo, remember a couple of years ago when a lot of people dressed up as Facebook walls? Well, this year I decided to create the next generation of the costume and be Pinterest for Halloween.

The Finished Product

Here's how I did it.

Supplies you will need: white T-shirt, iron-on transfer paper ($20 at Joann's), and fabric paint. 

Step 1: Choose the pins you want from Pinterest. I used the "Snipping Tool" feature on Windows 7 to get the Pins I wanted. 

Step 2: Copy the snipped pins on a Microsoft Publisher document (I used Publisher because it doesn't have the set formatting that Word does) and printed them out, using my regular old inkjet printer, on the transfer paper following the included directions (make sure you flip the images so that they print out as mirror images [it's "flip horizontal on Publisher], otherwise your Pins will be backwards on the shirt). I used the whole package of paper 10 sheets total with 4 pictures on each sheet. 

Step 3: Cut out the Pins, so that extra paper doesn't get transferred as well and look like an odd border. 

Step 4: Dry arrange the Pins on the t-shirt so that you know the layout before you move onto the ironing step. I also used a Disappearing Ink marker so that I knew exactly where I placed them.

Step 5: Following the given instructions, iron the pins onto the t-shirt as you prearranged. After ironing for the prescribed amount of time (15-20 seconds), peel off the back of the transfer paper and discard.

I did use a stencil. I'm not that great at drawing.

Step 6: Using fabric paint, paint the Pinterst logo onto the t-shirt. I could have used another iron-transfer, but I wanted the logo to be very vibrant and the transfers aren't.

Then, voila! Just add red pants (mine are Old Navy Rockstar Cords), red accessories (headband, earrings, and nail polish for me), and you're done. Ready to impress your friends at the Halloween party.

Here it is again.

Happy Pinning!

DoJ: Imperfect Bliss: A Novel

Imperfect Bliss: A Novel by Susan Fales-Hill

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Imperfect Bliss is an interesting edition to the Austen-inspired collection. Set in suburban Washington D.C., this contemporary, chick-lit follows Bliss Harcourt, a divorced mother and graduate student, on her path of rediscovery. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are very recognizable in Harold and Forsynthia Harcourt, a British professor of the history of science and a Jamaican-born Anglophile. Jane Bennet has transformed into Victoria Harcourt a thirty-five year-old librarian, who can't seem to love any man. The two younger Harcourts, Diana and Charlotte, are a mish-mash of the three youngest Benets, clamoring for attention in all the wrong ways, including being the star of a reality-TV show reminiscent of The Bachelorette and a sex-tape scandal.

What really intrigued me about this book was the fact that the Harcourt family dynamic was the center of the plot, not the romance between Bliss (Elizabeth) and Dario (the Latino TV director, Darcy). In fact Dario was such a flat and uninteresting character, I really didn't want Bliss to end up with him at all. I would have been much happier with Bliss realizing that she could be happy without a man after all three of the happily-ever-after potentials (ex-husband, dashing older professor, and Wickham character) turned out to be duds. The romantic aspect of the novel just seemed so forced and slapped on to the end that I was left feeling completely unsatisfied, especially after all of Bliss's feminist, politically correct, and self-actualized leanings in the book, especially when dealing with her mother and younger sisters as well as the lessons she tries to instill in her four year-old daughter, who reminds me of the little girl from Hope Floats.

So while the handling of the Bennet/Harocurt family dynamic was intriguing, the half-hearted attempt at romance left me feeling cold.

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