This book is a memoir of the author's hiking quest along the Pacific Crest Trail. At age twenty-two, the young woman had lost her mother Bobbi to cancer, who she considered to be the love of her life. Her brother, sister, and step-father essentially drifted apart to live their own lives after Bobbi passed away and was essentially the glued that held them together. Cheryl Strayed became a brief heroine addict and cheated on her husband with multiple partners to the point where her confession led to their divorce. The trip alongside the West coast is one of purging her spirit of things that had happened to her, and understanding how she ended up where she is by taking one long physically-emotionally exhausting and torturous path to do so.

Strayed provides a wonderful narrative of her life that is both broken and solid. There is a trend in Hollywood and literature that females are not considered adults, therefore have to baby up their language, sexuality, brains, and humor in order to gain the male audience. This book, along with Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (at least of recent memory), is refreshing in the sense that the female narratives are no holds barred. Cheryl needs help and doesn't know how to ask for it, sees her value through the eyes of others, and learns to equate her life by what she deems it to be. This woman had so much baggage it almost felt like you were wearing her overstuffed mountain gear along with her as she shares her experiences of cheating, her mother's death, and her family's undoing. So many of her passages emanate the loss of what she went through, and Cheryl doesn't go out of her way to glamorize her experiences or push specific spiritual lessons for the readers. It's her journey and we're along for the ride. There is no beating around the bush with her fuck-ups nor her desires or dreams, and I liked that Strayed's voice is one of that as a young adult woman's voice is; honest, frank, tormented, humorous, grateful, and enlightened.

Way back when in the early eighties when audiences saw Top Gun (starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer) and immediately wanted to become an Army pilot, I read this book and won't be ashamed to say that I am inspired to do something similar - to take a trip somewhere and sort myself out. It is not to replicate Cheryl's experience nor to see if trekking solo lives up to the idyllic poetic imagery this book served but more for my own sanity and thirst for adventure/self-reconciliation too. Such a major attraction to this memoir is the search for discovery through a singular experience with yourself, and not allowing obstacles in the form of addiction, broken family relationships, etc. stop you. Nature has a way of enveloping us into its arms, if we allow it do so, and Cheryl's experience is one that allows us to see the possibilities of what a trip like this can offer us - the solitude, the resolutions, the inner reckoning. Going through a ton of shit myself, I envied and was emboldened by her choice to deal with her demons in this way. To be ignited enough in her life by her mistakes, her grief of her family, and emotional pain of her past to gain a clearer understanding of who she is.

One thing should of note with this book is that Cheryl's experience is extraordinarily rare. Using guidebooks and having zero experience to actually hike, this woman completed her mission entirely underplanned. Her boots were too small. She arranged for a friend to send her care packages with twenty dollars at different rest stops; often leaving her with only a few cents in her pocket. It's easy to read this book and think that she should have been more prepared, but we are living in a different age of technology and cellphones at fingertips. I can't criticize the choices that Strayed made because who am I to do so, but I think it's a fair warning to those who might be encouraged to read this review to consider your full range of options before trying a trek of this magnitude on your own or with friends. She made plenty of friends and acquaintances along her trip that helped her but many of them are occurrences where her life truly could've been in danger. To read her journey from beginning to end, not only emotionally but physically, it's unimaginable to comprehend how she survived.

The most poignant aspects of the book is how Strayed deals with her mother's death and how it led to her abandoning herself through addictions to companionship, sexuality, drugs, and validation as a daughter. The story is as much as an adventurous trek as it is deep spiritual or personal reflection for Strayed, and to reduce the narrative to Hollywoodized ashes would be horrible as a reader, and for movie goers everywhere who are used to the "self-absorbed women struggling to find herself isolates herself from the world" ploy. Far from chick lit, or even chick flick, this book is a refreshing memoir and story of a woman who has fucked up big time and needs to reconcile all the parts of her life that has become brutally undone.

Coming to theatres in December 2014 starring Reese Witherspoon, I am so excited to see the adaptation. It's coming out on my birthday week, and I can't think of no other way of being excited to see it and go on the quest into the wild...except to plan my own excursion to take one day too.

In this day and age of social media and community building, it is difficult for me comprehend how we live out our lives online; personal experience and occasions becomes something to share with friends or followers online. We tumblr the latest fandoms we love on twitter, get into quicky conversations on twitter, and share our dream futures on pinterest. But when does a little becomes too much? Enter: Everybody's Baby by Lydia Netzer.

A couple Jenna and Billy meet, fall in love, get married, and struggle to get pregnant. Their last option is in-vitro fertilization, and after asking his parents for loans to a new house, they don't have the funds themselves for a procedure so expensive yet so deeply wanted. As an app builder and developer, Billy (sparked by an idea that Jenna has) creates a Kickstarter campaign; their goal is raise enough to do IVF and in return give perks to the "Baby Backers" who support their campaign. As the campaign becomes an internet sensation known as the #KickstarterBaby, perks are being sold like hotcakes, and a baby is eventually on the way, their pregnancy becomes everybody's business; quite literally, everybody's baby.

I was surprised that I enjoyed this novella on so many levels; the believably of the kickstarter campaign is extremely current and modern; its narrative is charming, and the questions it raises about our own families versus online communities is something that I'm sure I could write a ten page essay on. Netzer's voice is casual and realistic, and her world was so wonderfully and eerily a reflection of our own internet-obsessed. It's been a long time since I enjoyed a "chick lit" and I'm happy that her book may have me return to a genre that is a long-forgotten guilty pleasure.

As the main character and narrative, Jenna is a likeable protagonist to lead us into her crazy world; sarcastic, witty, introspective, and at a times a bit frustrating. As a young woman who was abandoned by her mother as a child, it was difficult to follow her determination to become a mother and simultaneously put up with a husband - who to me didn't seem to support her or their child at all. As she compares herself to Billy, she is "small and he is big", he is the world and she takes up the corner in a room of "his office" and life. So rarely when she felt she was in danger, or when her nerves were getting the better of her while fulfilling these creepy perks, she didn't speak up to herself and her growing baby until the very end. Jenna wanted a baby, and she got what she wanted in the end - but her doubts and Billy's ignorance made me question how much of the campaign was worth it when she wasn't enjoying it, only seemed to be planning for the birth of the baby to have someone to care for as she wasn't growing up, going through the motions of getting these baby-obsessed strangers out of her life. In their end her journey as a daughter and a mother are fulfilled, which was rewarding - I felt like she was a complex and interesting female character who could be enjoyed on the surface level and studied more of intellectual entertainment too.

But, on the downside of Jenna's journey, there is her husband Billy. If the characterization of her Scottish "cutie" husband was supposed to make me fall in love with him, as much as Jenna was - it didn't. From the beginning, he is ignorant, inattentive, and so usurped by his online following that he never really genuinely seemed to care or was worried about his wife or child. In the very first pages of Jenna meeting and falling in love with Billy, I was frustrated by how his hands and head was glued to his tablets, and their relationship didn't seem to be anything complex or genuine; just that they fell in love. Jenna was willing to invest in their relationship, and Billy was willing to tweet all of their private moments for entertainment to his fans, to fulfill all the perks even at the discomfort of his wife, and that his apps were selling well. Her perspective to me about Billy seemed forced and too forgiving at times. He displayed such a lackadaisical respect for her and their baby, I found it impossible to forgive him just because Jenna loved him and could oversee his "faults".

The perks in the book were definitely creative, original, and at times entertaining, but also made me want to jump inside my shell and never come out which included someone cutting the umbilical cord, naming their child, getting the only copy of the ultrasound picture, knowing the baby's gender before Jenna and Billy, taking home the placenta, and rubbing her pregnant belly. The latter of which Jenna has to spend a day where hundreds of people line up just to touch her. The journey of the couple is exactly how it is played out to the fictional internet world of the novel; you become invested in how the pregnancy will all work out.

And, the ways in which the fictional Baby Backers become so obsessed with Everybody's Baby maybe question and even feel disturbed how much we invest in each other's lives. To a point the Kickstarter campaign is richly current and modern, but also blurred the line of how much people online can be interesting as well as dangerous. When users on different websites were shown to hail Billy as a hero and Jenna "a bitch", and even refer to Jenna's baby as their own, it was gravely disturbing to me how it wasn't really an expressed issue of how much danger Jenna couldn't been in - when people are coming up to their table at dinner asking for autographs, photographers are following her on her way too work etc. Netzer creates a fully-realized world of the internet in its assumption that "we are all a community" but not everyone is sane or has good intentions. Even at the unfolding of the climax and conclusion of the book, I was disappointed that in some ways Jenna's wishes aren't fulfilled for them to live out their lives privately, for their baby to have a normal life after the campaign is over. Infants are now apart of internet history these days; their lives are everyone elses before they are their own. That to me is a bit sad.

In a lot of ways the plausibility of the Kickstarter campaign and the reality of how everyone is now living out their lives online, is one of the biggest reasons - if not the biggest reason, why I liked this book, and it also terrified me. The world in which Jenna and Billy live in is our own; we are glued into following other people's lives. On some levels this seems healthy; to make friends, participate in worthy conversations, kick back and have fun. But when does enough become too much of everyone else's. For me it would be a Kickstarter campaign and technically being co-erced into accepting that a stranger will name my baby after her cats. But, maybe that's just me....

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is set around a missing woman's case in Missouri, voiced by the nearly-perfect wife Amy Elliot Dunne who goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary, and the unhappy, number one suspect husband Nick Dunne.

Like life, the novel is split into perspectives and timelines, and easily, not knowing who to believe will hook you from the beginning.

The first part covers, Boy Loses Girl; a division of narratives every day Nick's wife goes missing and the investigative process, and old diary entries by Amy.

The second part covers Boy Meets Girl; the clues Nick uncovers over Amy's disappearance and loose ends of her past that seemed to be tied up in a nice pretty blue bow.

The third act, Boy Finds Girl (or Vice Versa) only leads to a stunning conclusion, if you are the type of person who predicts endings far advanced.

Unfortunately, I am one of those readers. Captivating, brilliant, and yet a bit entirely too cliche, the reading experience of Gone Girl was one of fascination and also frustration.

The conceptualization is easily addictive. For the first half of the novel, sympathy builds towards Amy as Nick seems to be living out just another day in Missouri, appearing unemotional and stoic. She is pictured, from old diary entries, as a unappreciated and abused housewife with a husband who only used her for her looks and wealth. As the the timeline rotates towards the second half of the novel, we begin to see the clearer picture of who Amy and Nick really are. Over the period a several weeks to years two lives come brutishly undone; one spouse is revealed to be a flaming psychopath, the other not-so-much, and they really fit perfectly together.

Both characters have a lot of baggage in terms of ghosts of their childhoods, broken relationships with parents, and failed dreams of becoming writers. Skeletons come out of the closet for both Amy and Nick, as it happens in every mystery/suspense novel, and there are a lot of interesting background characters and motives to play around with; Amy's obsessive ex-boyfriends and high school best friends, grudges that are held with an iron-grip, and little inner jokes between the couple that are the glue that holds them together. At most Gone Girl is more than a murder-mystery novel and uses typical devices like clues and suspects to build up a case around Nick, but then gradually builds a deeper psychological downfall of marriage and unrequited dreams.

As center performers in this novel, perhaps the most frustrating aspect was the narrative; both characters are entirely unreliable, which hooks you at first. But, then when the allure rubs off, the story grows repetitive and self-centeredness seems to be the root of the novel. Nick was the most frustrating was the male protagonist; there isn't a lot of sympathy to be had for him because he makes stupid decisions following his wife's disappearance, he shows more consideration over double-checking his every move so he is not made to be a main suspect, rather than being concern his wife is just gone. There is a technical draw to this, which comes full circle at the end of the novel, but it's not enough to really care what happens to him; eventually other supporting characters become more interesting, and inevitably aren't given their full purpose to the story.

And, perhaps the opposite of what the novelist intended to do, I began loving crazy Amy. Amy is definitely something else; wild, brilliant, smart, delusional, intuitive, unapologetic, down and dirty, and most of all, a female character who is the antithesis of normal female characters. In both books and entertainment, it's rare to come across a female character who feels wholly like an adult; she speaks her age, acts her age, even curses her age. She doesn't try to be a man in an man's world, she is an adult in the real world (however, off-kilter her perspective/reasoning/life experience may be). Her focus doesn't laser onto only fashion, only guy-centric, only wealth - like we often see in books and movies. Amy isn't purely a psychological vampire, nor a broken housewife, nor a tarnished daughter, nor someone who is merely missing, but so deeply layered and complex it will make your head spin. My thirst to know all about her is what drove me more to finish the book than I think actually finding out what happens to her.

Gone Girl is suspenseful and gripping, but I felt like I had seen the stage set before. In fact, I feel like I've seen it all before; the novel itself reminds me of a thriller I would watch at home like Prisoners on an empty Friday night where I was waiting for my mind to be turned into a pretzel only to be utterly disappointed by the ending that was not a surprise, gripping, or satisfactory. And perhaps for this novel's sake reality mixed with fiction a little too much for its own good because we have seen this scenario before. Television marathons of spouses snapping on each other committing murder and/or causing disappearances. The Nancy Graces of the world making nationwide cases out of personal family tragedies. A seemingly-perfect happy marriage systematically being dissolved by the those involved because of their own neuroses.

Psychologically, the novel is a page-turner. In the last 150 pages or so, the suspense loses its luster; the cat and mouse chase is gone, characters are running in circles, and the ending feels cheating. The fixation with Gone Girl, however, is that with the author's map at our fingertips, its easy to become the narrative's little pet to trail the investigation crumbs. But, even if the ending is unhappy, it should make sense, and not feel like a last-minute conclusion haphazardly thrown together. Even if the the characters aren't wholly likable, and they aren't supposed to be, "they should get what they deserve", but somehow they don't. The story, as a whole though, isn't entirely up shit creek, just doesn't live up to its hype.

Divergent by Veronica Roth
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Rating: ★ 1/2 out of 4 Stars
Recommend: The Sorting Hat & Hunger Games as a new series
Pros: The interactivity
Cons: Crazy-cliche dialogue and characters

Summary: As a citizen in futuristic Chicago, your life is depended on which faction you choose; Candor, Dauntless, Abegnation, and Erudite. One girl Beatrice Prior falls into the un-faction category and finds out dangerous secret plans.

Observations: This first book of Roth's series felt like Harry Potter's Sorting Hat on crack. If you're brave or smart you belong in Dauntless or Erudite, respectively. Or you may belong in Abegnation or Candor, if you're selfless or honest. And, there's Amity which is pretty much forgotten about because it's about peacefulness.

But if you don't belong in any faction - which holds more value than your own family - you will belong in Divergent. Members of this group means the government can't control them; they go on living homeless, jobless, without any respectable place in society.

In a high school aptitude test, the one girl who results in Divergent is our main character Beatrice Prior. An original resident to Abegnation, Beatrice grew up selfless. Citizens in this faction wear grey, keep their heads down, and selflessly serve everyone around them no matter how they feel.

After the aptitude test, each student of each faction can choose to stay within their own family, or one of the other factions they scored highest with. Since Beatrice didn't score with any other group, she can feel free to choose.
This mystery binds the book for nearly 500 pages (486 to be exact). Beatrice chooses Dauntless, the group of the brave. She changes her name to Tris to begin her new identity. Herself and other initiates travel around the city by hopping on moving trains, are forced to physically beat each other to a pulp, train with knife throwing, perform through hallucinatory tests where they experience their greatest fears, get tattoos...and so on.

As a reader I couldn't distinctly tell one faction from another. Fellow Dauntless initiates Christina (who was originally from Candor) sounds like Al who sounds like Will (from Erudite) who sound like Beatrice. As a reader it was hard to decipher if Chicago is broken up into actual factions with borders that cannot be trespassed, or are the citizens allowed to commune with each other in public but not privately. The sphere of how these factions interact was all over the map - literally.

Told in first person from Beatrice's point of view, the entire story feels blurred together. There is no clear line between where the true danger lies, no feeling of the other factions, or why we as a reader do not want to be Divergent...when the ending just leads people there anywhere.



The mysterious unrest within Erudite is slowly unraveled. Its leader is raising an army of sorts. Honestly, I was interested in reading this book because of the summary. Once I started I found that my interest lay deeper in that Kate Winslet is going to be in the movie.

Her character Jeanne has perfected a serum with a microchip which has been injected into the people of Dauntless. Besides turning them into robots so a violent killing spree of Abegnation through the streets of Chicago, I couldn't find much of a villain.

The climax is bloody and violent, but the antagonist came off as more of a control freak on a rampage instead of a government member with a master plan. Because of the brutal violence, everyone pretty much becomes factionless. The one fear we are meant to feel from the beginning of the book comes just comes true. I wondered if this would have been better as a second book rather than a first one, so there was much more interest in the factions before they were just hinted at and then their communities torn apart.

Roth is admirable for creating a series that has seemingly hit it big. Along the way of reading Divergent, I began to question which faction I would fall into naturally and which one would I choose to be apart of. On the same level of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, it has a unique level of interactivity between the words on the page and the reader.

Overall though, looking at the writing, I found it to have really poor world building, cliche prose, and a mix of popular aspects that worked for other series. As it seems to be with every big phenomenon I'm the last to join the bandwagon. Similar to The Hunger Games, I'm completely clueless as to why this too is a colossal hit.

A play that I found to be a true joy to read. The title really says it all about the characters and the storyline, and John Patrick Shanley has an impeccable style of creating layers of doubt, what stirs it, how it drives people. There's a saying about don't judge a book by its movie, but with Doubt, you can judge a play by its movie which is just as great as the play.

This is quite simply one of my favorite autobiographies and one that I highly recommend to fans of Classic Hollywood. Dick Van Dyke shares his tales in showbusiness with a voice that is extremely conversational and makes you feel like you've known him forever. He doesn't give the dirty lo-down on the biz, which will disappoint people who only want the scoop...but Dick's tone is frank and honest, you know he's pulling no punches about his experiences. In an interview on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson promoting the book, Dick mentioned that he was originally going to name it "Well Everyone Else Has One"... That title, as Ferguson, pointed out would have probably been a little shocking and too sarcastic for a star who is so charming and charismatic. And, I agree! His book is about how luck seemed to be on his side for most of his life, and I will say, after reading this book, I felt lucky having read it! :D