On New Year’s Eve 2011, I was frantically trying to finish reading this memoir. Since I worked until after 9 p.m. on the 31st, I wasn’t finishing it before midnight Atlantic Standard Time but I definitely did before midnight in the Pacific time zone! And then, as you can see, blogging about it took even longer….
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Unbearable Lightness is Porta de Rossi’s 2010 memoir of the dark and difficult events of 1998 and 1999 when she joined the cast of Ally McBeal. It has been sitting on my e-reader (i.e., iPhone) …

It’s not really a secret that I wanted to be a cheerleader. But one major factor was not attending public school. My school didn’t even have a dance team. So, I’ll pass and probably be that mother who tries to live vicariously through her daughter!
The title, Cheer! Inside the Secret World of College Cheerleaders, was so familiar to me because I watched all the episodes of the CW series, Hellcats, and Cheer! was always acknowledged in the opening credits as the basis of the series. One day, I was browsing around …

I first heard about Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story (SSTLS) through Spark, the CBC technology podcast (abbreviated interview in Episode 120, full 20-minute interview) and hopped onto the library website to place a hold on it. My interest waned and I didn’t pick it up until I recently saw it again at the library’s Central Branch as a Fast Read (finish in 7 days or else!). I want to procrastinate from some real world stuff, so this time was as good as any. Further, I had recently …

Although Sense & Sensibility as a Marvel comic came out on November 17, 2010, I do not darken the doorways of comic book stores and only learned about it in April 2011 from an LJC blog entry. I tremulously entered a comic book store one day and saw there were Female Force comics of Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Martha Stewart, to name a few, and no Jane Austen. It was much more comfortable to surf the bookstore from home!
I decided upon Sense & Sensibility because I do not have …

I started reading Angela Tung’s blog many years ago, drawn in by stories of her single life in New York City with a good communications job at a big pharma company. Searching back through GMail, I learned she commented on my blog for the first time in October 2006–I hadn’t realized it has been that long! I’m 100% sure her Internet handle at the time was a big hook for me and then her writing, her sardonic way of relating her life kept her blog amongst my most anticipated reads …

Are you a Jessica or Elizabeth? Although I just tested Elizabeth*, I’m quite sure I’m Jade Wu who, Wikipedia informs me, turns trampy and nasty a year after we meet her as a sophomore in Out of Reach, but I digress.
I was just the right age to read Sweet Valley High, that I shall dub The Original Series, and not get into the spin-off series in any great depth. Looking through the list of novels in The Original Series, and surprising myself with what I can remember of general plots, I’m …

I have been reading Cathy Erway’s memoir, The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love The Stove, in the strangest places. I read about two-thirds of the memoir over several elliptical sessions at the gym and some of the rest while, fittingly, eating out. And since it was the kind of meal where I could read while eating, it wasn’t a spectacular meal or while with friends.
Based on an unpublished blog entry of mine where I alluded to Erway’s popular blog, Not Eating Out in …

I like tracing the route by which I find myself reading a certain novel. In the case of embarking this year on reading all nine Little House books, a couple of years ago: NPY and I were visiting a friend and–true to my form–I read the titles off the spines of the volumes on her bookshelf. She exhibits a similar whole-series compulsion like I have, with not just the first three Anne books, but all 8. She also had all of the Twilight and/or Harry Potter books. And, what caught …

A Smart Canucks post, “Do we take multiculturalism for granted here in Canada?” (warning: a NSFW image is first thing in that post) alerted me to this seemingly surreal book, a recently published exposé by former Wall Street money manager J.C. Davies, I Got the Fever. Her credentials to write this book include, according to her bio, an undergraduate degree in psychology, a masters degree in public health, and 20 years of dating men of different cultures*. The book purports to cover from her own experiences and interviews with women …

My one-time personal trainer–two sessions came with my gym membership–told me that losing weight is 80% diet changes. That 20% from lifestyle change sounds so minimal it was quite a disincentive for me to go hardcore and hit the gym often. (Yes, I know, physical activity confers bountiful benefits beyond shedding pounds.) I know that something in my brain is wrong that allows me, nay, urges me to eat as much as I can some days. And I’ve never been a dieter or calorie counter: “being on a diet would …