Book Review: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

I love Mindy Kaling as an actress.  I thought her character on the TV show “The Office” was hilarious, and I really like her new show “The Mindy Project”.  So, when I saw that she had a book out, I had to read it.  Mindy also turns out to be a very funny author as well.  The book is basically a synopsis of her life so far, and she wrote the book as a series of essays.  The stories range from very funny to touching to self-deprecating, sometimes all in the same essay.  Mindy writes her essays, knowing that some of the things she is relating to you is absurd, and she quickly points out the absurdities.  This all makes Mindy that much more appealing as an author. 

The book ends before “The Office” is off the air and her new show has begun.  I hope Mindy writes another book, and I will be one of the first to read it.

Book Review: A Walk in the Woods

I read A Walk in the Woods a year or two ago and I loved it.  I’m not sure exactly where I heard about it, but it was on a recommended book list in a magazine.  The book follows Mr. Bryson as he embarks on a quest to walk the Appalachian Trail, which runs down the mountains that are (somewhat) along the east coast.  Since I read it so long ago, I don’t remember a lot of the details, but the book was certainly laugh-out-loud funny in many, many places.  Mr. Bryson is an illustrative author, and as you read the book, you can really picture the areas that he is walking through.  I learned a lot about the trail and the towns along it.  I also felt inspired to walk more in my personal life.  I loved the book so much that I bought a copy so I can re-read it on a whim.

Book Review: Drop Dead Healthy

I went on an A.J. Jacobs kick earlier this year and read most, if not all, of his books.  Of all of them, as a person who has aspirations of being a health nut but is too lazy to follow through on them, I found this book to be the best one that he has written.  It follows Mr. Jacobs through a series of efforts to improve his health as he focuses on different topics that range from exercise to sleep to sex to brain health and many others.  It was also very funny to read Mr. Jacobs relate how the efforts of his experiments affected not only him but his family as well. 

Mr. Jacobs did a lot of research before embarking on his experiments and relates the research behind each experiment throughout the book.  He has plenty of articles and books cited in his bibliography, so I trust that his research is fairly thorough.  I found the information he presented to be fascinating and learned a few things that I put into practice myself.  At the end of the book, Mr. Jacobs relates what aspects of his experiments he will keep practicing long after the book has been published.  While I was reading this book, I wish I had kept some sticky notes beside me to mark the pages that I wanted to refer back to.  While research and scientific opinions are constantly changing (i.e. one day shrimp is bad for you, the next day it’s fine), I would love to purchase this book and re-read it.  I’m sure that I missed some topics that I would like to further implement in my own life.

Book Review: The Year of Living Biblically

I read this book earlier this year.  I had read some of A.J. Jacobs’s other books and found them (mostly) to be very interesting.  This book explores Mr. Jacob’s quest to live his life according to the Old Testament.  He explores many of the rules that are listed in those texts which, as a Jewish person myself, I found to be very interesting.  Since I’m not very religious, there are plenty of rules that I have heard about (like many of the rules the Hasidic Jews follow), but didn’t quite understand.  This book explores many of those rules (and lots of others I had never heard about) and explains what the theory is supposed to be behind them.  It was interesting and fun to read about Mr. Jacobs’s exploration of these rules, which he did from a realistic and funny point of view.

I would definitely recommend this book and am glad I read it. 

Book Review: Bossypants

I read Tina Fey’s book earlier this year and was really excited to read it.  I think Tina Fey has been hilariously funny on SNL as both an actor and a writer.  I also liked her comedy, “30 Rock”, for the first few seasons before it got all messy and weird.  Well, I should have kept that in mind before picking up Ms. Fey’s book.  I had such high hopes for it, but in many, many places, the book was very scattered.  It’s almost as if parts of the book were just following Ms. Fey’s train of thought down a long, winding path and actively tried to lose its readers.  These types of passages made me think of the last seasons of “30 Rock” and made me realize why they were as messy as they were – because that’s how the writers think, apparently.

There were some parts that were funny, but overall I was really disappointed in this book.  Considering Ms. Fey’s celebrated writing for TV, I was certainly expecting much more.

Garden Update: 2013

I didn’t write much this year about my little container garden because this year has been pretty disappointing.  We had a VERY wet spring (which is pretty unusual) and that (according to all of the other gardeners I have talked to) contributed to a pretty awful tomato crop.  I grew a dozen cherry tomato plants from seed and just recently (as in within the past two weeks) have been able to harvest any of the tomatoes.  Not many tomatoes grew at all (maybe a dozen) and three or so plants didn’t even produce any tomatoes.  I don’t know why, but the plants did bloom (eventually), and many of those blooms just withered away.  I can even see some teeny-tiny tomatoes if I inspect the blooms; they just didn’t grow.  I did successfully grow tomato plants from seeds, though, so that was exciting!

In addition to the tomatoes, at the suggestion of an experienced container gardener, I have also been growing basil this year.  Once my tomato plants got a few inches high, I threw basil seeds in the same pots as the tomato plants.  The basil has been doing really well, and we have been enjoying basil in tomato-based dishes this year.  I need to find a recipe for making pesto from scratch so that I can use a bunch at once, because there is quite a lot (hooray!).

In early September, I also decided to try some cold-weather crops, so I planted some scallion and spinach seeds.  The scallions have sprouted nicely; the spinach hasn’t sprouted as well, but I will keep watering both anyway.  It will be interesting to see what grows to maturity!