Bookish Thoughts

I came across The Bloggess many years ago. Her blog is hilarious and compassionate. She has a multitude of chronic illnesses, running the gamut from depression to arthritis. Her writing is a blend of dark humor and the wacky shenanigans she finds herself in, with a dash of brutal honesty thrown in. She's always funny and occasionally heart-breaking. I enjoyed her first book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened , which is a more straight-forward memoir about her crazy life and offbeat upbringing, which instilled in her an appreciation for strange taxidermy, among other things. Her second book is more like a collection of her blog entries, in handy portable form. (Though I suppose her blog is pretty portable, what with current technology. But this is like the greatest hits.) I didn't like this book quite as much as her first one. It still made me laugh, though I wasn't literally laughing out loud as frequently, or shaking while I tried not to laugh. It was funny and amu...

I first discovered Jenny Lawson when Neil Gaiman linked to a blog entry of hers detailing their meeting at W00tstock. You can go read it here , but the takeaway message is that after asking Gaiman whether unicorns or zombies would win in the battle for world domination, she proceeded to explain why he was completely wrong. I started clicking through her blog which never failed to make me laugh. Jenny is insane, and she has debilitating rheumatoid arthritis. Somehow she manages to find the humor in all of this and pass along her intense joy in life. I'd definitely recommend checking out her blog. Just click through to a few random posts. But make sure you look up the James Garfield Christmas Miracle , which still brings tears to my eyes. Not in a laugh so hard I'm crying way, but in a my faith is restored in humanity way. The book is a lot like her blog. It's somewhat more structured, since she actually had an editor for it, but the style and content are ver...