I think all women should read this book. Wait, I take that back. I think all women and all men should read this book.
Career minded, family minded, or neither… I think it’s amazing that there are so many ways in which women hurt themselves and each other, and so many ways in which just being a woman makes it harder to succeed.
Go, read it!
My Rating: 2.75 / 5
Mindy Kaling first caught my attention as Kelly Kapoor on The Office. Since then, I’ve have learned that she started as a writer, and even produced and directed several episodes. She now has her own tv series, The Mindy Project, which is one of my favorite new comedies.
Her book, however, was just ok. There’s some funny stories, and the feeling that she’s confiding in a close friend as she relays anecdotes and thoughts about her life. I was really expecting it to be over the top funny, and while there are a few funny parts, it’s mostly boring. (Sorry Mindy!)
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
My rating: 2.5 / 5
This book is tough to rate. I wanted to like it, and I read it really quickly and mostly enjoyed it. But in the end, I just couldn’t relate to Cheryl. Personally, I was expecting a life changing experience, an open, honest, memoir, etc. Instead, I feel like I got a book about [spoiler alert, stop reading now if you don’t want to know any details] a woman’s who’s mother died, causing her to go on a sex and heroin binge, ruin her marriage and undertake a 90 day backpacking trip that, really, was probably not her best idea.
I kept waiting for her to have some emotional breakdown or revelation that never came. There was no big watershed moment. The biggest thing seems to be her deciding that she was OK as-is.
Did I miss something? Was there a hidden meaning, some hidden layer here that I missed? All I see is that she got really lucky. She was unprepared, over-packed, and out of money. She is lucky she didn’t die from any number of things. That being said, the one moment in the book that did feel real, that got my attention, was when she was slightly off the PCT on an unexpected side trail and ran into the bow hunters. I felt for her there, but again, I kept coming back to the fact that she could have, SHOULD have, been more prepared. Mace, pepper spray, etc, any of those things would have been extremely useful for her to have had with her on the PCT and I think she just got lucky.
