Dan Savage’s The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided To go Get Pregnant was a humorous and interesting story about the adoption process from Dan and his boyfriend’s perspective. I’ve heard Mr. Savage speak and I thought he was incredibly humorous and he had a great one liner about men sleeping with men (“Gay relationships have to have good communication. We’d better talk every time we have sex, I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie there and take it for the next 20 years.”) and although I haven’t had a chance to read his weekly article, I have read his blog a few times.
I think the most rewarding part about the book is learning more about the adoption process. There are greater stories, like Homo Domesticus: Notes from a Same-Sex Marriage by David Valdes Greenwood, but this one dealt solely on the adoption process and the emotions (or lack thereof) involved.
This novel/memoir completely surprised me. I knew of the controversy, but managed to avoid knowing anything else about the novel. Regardless of whether this novel/memoir is falsified or true (Frey has admitted that it was embellished), I think more people should read it. I thought James Frey provided an interesting and intimate look into the life of an addict, whether it was fabricated or not, I still think it was a beautiful story. His writing style took a while to get used to, but over-all it didn’t take anything away from the story.
As much as I wanted to, I could not bring myself to like most of the stories in this book. Fitzgerald has a way with turns of phrases and can set a story better than most, but I cannot get over the fact that all he writes about is, money, alcohol, parties and women. There were a couple of stories that stood out: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (the reason I read the collection) and “O Russet Witch!” It is interesting to note that both of these are in the section of short stories Fitzgerald calls ‘Fantasies.’ The Lees of Happiness was also a good story, but it is under ‘Unclassified Masterpieces,’ and The Jelly-Bean in the ‘My Last Flappers’ portion. Four out of eleven isn’t too bad, but some of them were just odd.
Out of the Pocket was a random decision. I’d never heard of the author, but I got an eReader and it was one of the books I could down load from the local library, so I thought why not? It’s primarily geared towards young adults/teenage readers, (as can be seen by my quick reading) but I still enjoyed it. Although not the best book ever written, or even the most exciting book ever written, it reminded me of great sports biographies I’ve read, specifically Inside Out: Straight Talk from a Gay Jock by Mark Tewksbury.
White Teeth was a much more interesting read than I thought it would be. It was originally selected as one of the book group books for our AmeriCorps book group, but that sort of fell to the wayside a few months ago and I’d already purchased it.