Back to School

Better late then never right? I had a fabulous vacation and read a TON! I ran out of stuff to read and found myself scrounging through Doug's books and anything that was lying around. Let me get caught up though because I left a bit of a backlog. So let's get started.

Since it's September, the back to school, back to work, back to sweaters, back to jeans, back to jammed up schedules, I thought I would start with Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake. What does this have to do with back to school? Well, it's a book of essays. I was an English major and back to school also went back to writing.

A word of advice when reading a book of essays: do not read them all in one sitting - especially this book of essays. I read this book on a flight somewhere (I can't remember now). It didn't take me long - largely because they all sounded the same. Maybe if I would have read one or two and put it down, it wouldn't have been so, what word can I use, tiresome.

Having written a fair share of essays in my time, I don't know that I would categorize Crosley as an "essayist". Call me old fashioned, but when I was in school, an essay introduced a position, provided a well thought out and persuasive argument to support the position, and drove it home with a compelling conclusion. Whining about what a loser in love you are, how you lose your keys all the time and how your family is comprised of a bunch of whack jobs, does not make for riveting prose.

At the end of the day, the last thing I cared about was a whiny, privileged, white girl living in Manhattan. So, if you see it and you are drawn in by the rave reviews about Sloane Crosley's wit and humour my advice is to pick one story, read it and put it away. You would have gotten the same out of it as I did reading the whole thing.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake
Sloane Crosley
Berkeley Trade