Tag: elizabeth gilbert

Books that Bug Me

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By jamelah, Flickr Creative Commons

Last weekend I went to the Connecticut Forum Book Club and watched John Irving, Azar Nafisi, and Jonathan Franzen  talk about everything from the role of authors in our society to their favorite words. It was a fascinating evening that made me long for my college-days, when I spent so many hours of the day talking about books.

So my friend and I decided we were going to finally commit to tackling The Corrections, Franzen’s breakthrough novel. This is something I haven’t been able to do for years. I loathe just about every character in the book and just kind of wish they’d all get wiped out by chapter five courtesy of a plague. Oddly, I feel much the same way about this book as I do Eat, Pray, Love. The comparison seems a bit of stretch, I know. It’s not about the writing, it’s about the feelings the characters stir up in me: mainly, annoyance.  Continue reading →

Why Do I Do This To Myself?

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eat-pray-love-movieAgainst my better judgement I watched Eat Pray Love on Saturday night. It popped up in the “New Arrivals” section of my Netflix and I had nothing better to do, so I figured I’d see if the movie somehow managed to be more worthwhile than the book. Nope. It was worse.

I read the book a few years back when I was working in book publishing and felt out of the loop for not having read it. It was a quick read, and it’s pretty infectious in that you can’t help but wish you had the time and money to go on the same kind of adventure. But I found Elizabeth Gilbert immensely unlikable and just know that had I met her in those days I would have thought she was fun for about 3 months and then realized all the same things she realized about herself — namely that she was boy-crazy and had no real sense of herself — and would have wanted to slap her. (To be fair, I’ve been freakishly self-possessed since I was…well…born.)  Continue reading →