Just finished and enjoyed:

Rebecca's Tale by Sally Beauman (it's similar to The Wide Sargasso Sea in that it tells the back story(ies) of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.)

Grave Sight and Grave Surprise by Charlaine Harris. These were short and quick!

Now I'm reading The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. I'm enjoying that too.

Oh my goodness, i forgot about all the sex scenes in Running With Scissors. How oh how could i forget those? (probably blocked them out) But that is right. To anyone that i recommended Running with Scissors to, i still love the book but if you are offended easily by some questionable sex scenes, better to skip it. Even if you aren't, be prepared for a lot of detail and its not the "good kind" of detail either. The boy is 13 and his male "lover" is 30...it is offensive but it is a true story. That is not really what the book is about, I was more offended at his mothers behavior than the lover that was far too old to be having sex with the 13 yo, but it does go on in the writers life, so he wrote about it. But all in all, i still categorize this as a comedy. I laughed more than i cried so to speak.

p.s. Lindsey, your bf will probably NOT like the book. I think a hetero male will really freak out to some of the sex scenes. He will probably like the movie though. My dh would have FREAKED OUT to the book, the movie was VERY tame in comparison. DH LOVED the movie.

I don't think I laughed once. I never saw it as a comedy. I thought everyone in the book had some serious mental illness, except perhaps the author, but being with all those wackos made him a wacko of sorts also.

Allison, really? You didnt find running with scissors even slightly funny? I thought it was hysterical. But i guess i do consider myself to have a bit of a twisted sense of humor.

I think there is a fine line in what *you* consider mental illness, *i* consider quirky or eccentric.

See, i am even laughing now at some of the scenes in that book. Do i think it was funny for the 30 yo man to have sex with a 13 yo boy? No, that grossed me out. BUT i did think it was awesomely hilarious for a psychiatrist to have a masterbation room. For some teenagers to knock the ceiling of the kitchen out so they could have "some breathing room"...i dont know, i just loved it.

I guess to sum it up, if you have a sick/twisted sense of humor, you will love it. If you have a straight laced sense of humor, avoid this book like the pleague.

Okay, so maybe they weren't mentally ill, but definitely weird! It was a year or more ago that I read the book, so I don't remember a lot of particulars, but the thing with the doctor and his poop inspection--like palm reading only poop reading, that was just weird. I mean, who fishes out their poop to inspect it (or request that his kids do it for him?).
I wonder how his own kids turned out.
I guess I just don't have the right sense of humor to have enjoyed the book.

allison, in the movie, at the end, it gives details about how the kids turned out. Although i dont know how *stable* they are...there is no way they are stable coming from that much dysfunction. I cant remember now what it said, but i think they all turned out with respectable jobs and normal lives...which surprised me. Although, i know augusten ended up a RAGING alcoholic, from his follow up book Dry.

And i agree the poop thing was nuts. That is what made me decide this guy was really living this and not making it up...you just cant make something that far fetched up. LOL

Oh, I don't know.....people have great imaginations. How else do you think sci fi fantasy genres come about... Also, what about the books by James Frey (A Million Little Pieces and the follow up--can't remember the name)? I loved those books and frankly they were a whole lot more believable than Augustin Burrow's book (I haven't read Dry yet). And yet now we're led to believe that Frey's books were all made up. I don't know, they still rang true to me (I guess because we have family members with drug and alcohol problems and his descriptions were so correct IMO).

I just started Grave Sight after finishing the Sookie/Southern Vampire series. Those were so much fun I figured I wanted to check out her others. It is actually my gym book (I get the large print versions so I can read on the elliptical).

I'm reading A Bride Most Begrudging. My next door neighbor gave it to me and said it was good...she majored in English in college, so I consider her an expert. It seems good so far. Seems to have good prose and a good voice to it. To me, voice is the most important part of a story. A bad story can be great with a good voice, but a good story can be very painful to read with a bad voice...if you know what I mean... So, my NDN knows how much I hate a bad voice, so I don't think she would give me a book by a cheesy author.

So far so good...

Am reading On the Road - Kerouac.

I'm with alinnell on Running With Scissors--the book just wan't funny for me. For one thing, they weren't sex scenes, they were rape scenes. I don't believe that it is possible for a 13-year old boy to consent to sex with a 30-year old. Sex that is not consensual is rape. The whole poop inspection thing was just gross. And I was really bothered by the daughter killing the cat. That was awful.

And the problem is that Burroughs wrote about it all like it supposed to be funny. Like was funny that a 30-year old was repeatly raping a 13-year old, like it was funny that the daughter killed the cat. There were some things that were genuinely funny, but the other stuff really overwhelmed the rest of the book for me. I felt sick to my stomach when I finished it. But I'm the minority--I know a lot of people thought the book was hilarious.

A book that I did find to be laugh-out-loud funny is Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Rosenthal. No rape scenes or cat killing.

Also, I find anything by Tim Cahill to be laugh-out-loud funny, especially Road Fever. I've read it probaby 10 times and I still laugh every time.

I snicked a Barbara Delinsky from work yesterday. More Than Friends.
I read Three Wishes years ago and bawled my eyes out. I never do that with a book.

I am also re-reading Harry Potter-I'm almost done with book 3. I am rereading because I realized when I read number 6 finally that i had forgotten everything that had happened before. They are fairly quick and easy reads though, I'm sure I'll be done in time to read number 7.

I thought the movie Running with Scissors was hilarious - but I do have an evil sense of what is funny (the house of yes for instance). Now I think I should get the book.

Before I got sucked into Harry Potter, I started reading an Amy Tan book called The Kitchen God's Wife - what I read so far is great, and multiple times I've laughed out loud already.

The Alchemist was great, I definitely think everyone should read that book.

I mostly read sci-fi/fantasy and I am dying waiting for the next George RR Martin book in his Fire and Ice series. I think I'll be waiting another year though.

These were the first books I've found by Harris and I liked the sort of dour tone they have. There is another one in the series coming out in the fall. My branch library doesn't have any other of her books , but I was able to reserve a couple others through the county system.

i've just started Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris, and re-reading (because I love it so much) Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri.

i really want to read The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, gotta get my hands on it!