Bag a bunch of book reviews

I finished up a bunch of books between camping and this weekend so I thought I'd comment on a few.

One of the first books I devoured recently was the sequel to Dan Savage's book The Kid. This one is The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family. This one was also excellent. I like his style, he is very straight forward. This one picks up several years after The Kid does and he and his partner Terry are planning their 10 year anniversary. In gay boy world that's like a 50th anniversary. He talks a lot of politics in the story but there's a lot of warmth and heart and I think I might have shed a tear or two with this book. I highly recommend him.

I also read quickly The Answer is Yes. I also really enjoyed this one. Amazon gives it a favorable review also I see. Basically it is the story of a young woman in a new town whose husband is a bit distant and how she really wants to be happy. She ends up at the Institute of Affirmation which holds adult classes in things like Making Miracles. It is mostly her quest to find herself and she manages to find all sorts of happiness along the way. I really enjoyed it.

I picked up Something Borrowed after I discovered that Something Blue (which I previously read) was actually the sequel to it. I shouldn't have liked this book. I'm against books about affairs (although the couple was not yet married so that is a bit more of a gray area to me but they were engaged). But there was something about this book that made me like it. Maybe it was that the main character was always being upstaged by her best friend and I could relate to that. (Not currently, but in high school my best friend was the pretty one and the one who went out with the guys I liked and the one who just seemed to have all the breaks.) So I think I liked the aspect that I really could understand where the girl was coming from. Strangely, even though I read Something Blue first, I think I liked this order almost better. I know the aftermath of the affair and then got to see how we got there. I don't know that I would've liked the stories had I read them the other way around, but since the 2nd book really focuses on Darcy (the slighted best friend) I feel like I knew her better than in the 1st book.

I checked out Correcting the Landscape because I found it on Peeved Michelle's wishlist from Amazon. She and I have somewhat similar tastes in books so when I'm desperate for an author I look up her wishlist and 9 times out of 10 she has a bunch of new books on there, many of which seem interesting so I can check them out. :) This one, at least so far, was not interesting. In fact it was so not interesting I put it down after about the 3rd chapter. I don't think I like the author's writing style.

One other I read was Cover the Butter. I found it on the new books shelf and thought it looked interesting. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be based on the descriptor although now that I've read some of the Amazon reviews I think that might have been just me. :) (Or it is because I've been reading a lot of Thursday Next books where anything can happen). It was solid and I did feel bad for the main character a lot of the book, but I don't know that I enjoyed it. I didn't hate it enough to put it down though so that's a good thing. :)

Finally I've been working through the Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series. (And again when I went to search for these books on Amazon I typed in Fforde, Jas and couldn't get the damn books. Seriously there's a conspiracy. But I digress. I'm now working on #2 in the series but I've already read 3 & 4 (honestly, if an author is going to do a series they should be numbered in an obvious way, and I realize that publishing dates is kind of obvious but somehow I missed that and got 3 & 4 before 2 and just decided to read those first.). I really like these books. I think they're very smart reading and just really fun. I can't explain why I like them so much, I just do. :)