I love my Kindle, though I have to admit it’s dangerous to my wallet. (Boy, I hope my husband doesn’t read this!). In the past 6 weeks or so, I’ve read the following novels: Shanghai Girls: A Novel by Lisa See, and The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Shanghai Girls was a very interesting story of the life of a family in Shanghai in the early 1900s and their many trials and tribulations of losing all their money and the daughters escaping the country and building a new life for themselves in America. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, but I didn’t love the ending. I once heard in a writing workshop that a book needs to have a satisfying ending–not a happy ending, necessarily, but one that leaves the reader satisfied. This ending left me hanging a bit. The Help was a book about the life of “colored” housekeepers/nannies pre-Civil Rights era. The dialogue and dialect in this book was just superb. Very authentic and very easy to read (dialogue is very difficult to write and nailing the speech patterns of a local dialect while still maintaining readibility is not easy!). It was an interesting subject: how the “help” was treated by their employers and how both sides felt about each other, and a unifying event that brought them together (I don’t want to give any spoilers).

I’ve read a few memoirs too: Teacher Man by Frank McCourt, Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison and Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Teacher Man was the third Frank McCourt book I read, and while it was probably my least favorite of the three, it was interesting to read about the stories of a public school teacher in New York, how he struggled to become one and continually struggled to engage and teach his students. I finished the book asking myself if I would want my children to have him as a teacher (theoretically–he is now retired). I’m not sure. I think he taught his students life lessons and creativity, but I’m not sure how much English they actually learned. He doesn’t apologize, just lays it out there and entertains you with his students stories. I find it interesting how infrequently McCourt uses commas and quotation marks. It’s just his style I guess.

Look Me in the Eye I wanted to read a couple years ago and it just dropped off my radar. I was on an online writing bulletin board with John Elder Robison when he was finishing up the book and we had a brief email exchange. His book is about his life with Aspberger’s Syndrome, his unrecognized intellectual genius, his childhood pranks, his crazy family, his love of pyrotechnics and innovation and his successes and missteps in his life. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It also tempted me to read his brother’s memoir (published years before and made into a movie), Running with Scissors.

Running with Scissors, by Augusten Burroughs, is his account of Augusten Burroughs of his abandonment by his parents, being raised by a crazy psychiatrist in a filthy home, his lack of schooling, early sexual experience and his realization of his homosexuality, and his processing all the surreal events and people he dealt with on a daily basis. I recently had a conversation with a friend about this book and she said she didn’t “buy” a lot of stuff in it. Hmm, who REALLY knows, but after being a community social worker for 6 years in my mid-late 20s, I could conceptualize all of it! It reminded me of the lady I visited who lived in filth, had a glass of Coke sitting at her bedside covered with a tissue and rubber band. She’d remove the cover and swirl the liquid to check for roaches before drinking. People do actually live like that, unfortunately and in much, much worse conditions.

Both of these brothers obviously are talented writers. Candy has recommended I read Dry by Augusten Burroughs. I guess that means I have to get out my wallet again!