4: LA Candy by Lauren Conrad

Yes, I read this. For real. It was mind candy.

It was about young Jane Roberts' move to LA and how she and her best friend Scarlett somewhat accidentally end up with their own reality show.

Really a stretch for the author.

3: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

My friend Betsy and I pooled our friend resources and started a book club. Our first meeting was on Sunday and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout was our first read.

Overall, it was extremely well-written (I mean, it did win the Pulitzer Prize last year), but I don't know if I would recommend it. The book is comprised of short stories surrounding a small town in Maine, which is the only thread besides the character the book is named for. It was certainly an interesting way to arrange vignettes, and a new format to be sure. Ms. Strout also has an incredible way with words, but I didn't really walk away with any real feeling about the book.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Although I am sure most, if not all of you, have read this at some point, let me jsut recommend this one. Even though my English teacher did all she could to beat this one to death, it's hard to get past the twisted family tree that pervades the novel. To be perfectly basic, it is the story of two households in England that have a screwed up history of deceit and a cycle of revenge that proves difficult to break. The story is told with shifting timelines and a frame narrative, so everything that is said in the first chapter is completely irrelevant until you get to the parts that explain it. Overall, I'm happy to have finished this book, and I did kind of like it.

Cane by Jean Toomer

Cane is an interesting book. It's regarded as one of the best works of the Harlem Renaissance, and is a pretty dense read. He combines plenty of poetry with prose and drama, and even the prose ends up feeling very poetic. It's very stream-of-conscious-like writing, though not technically, and tells a series of stories from the South focusing on race relations, sexual conventions of the African American community, sugarcane, and general southern-ness. I would not particularly recommend it unless someone is craving a text with integrated parts of prose and poetry. 117 pages.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

VERY good novel, a classic and for good reason, the story is loosely based off of the time that Hemingway spent in Paris and Europe after WWI where he was injured as an ambulance driver. In the novel, however, the protagonist's injury is his man parts and chronicles his group of alcoholic ex-pat friends as they live and travel in a drunken haze. The story takes the group on vacation in Spain where Hemingway uses bullfighting as vivid and beautiful metaphor for masculinity of his characters (all of which are, or have at one time, trying to pursue the same woman, Lady Bret). Recommended for everyone, a classic from arguably the greatest American writer of the 20th century. 247 pages.

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

It's one of Hemingway's earliest collections of short stories, and par usual for the man, is thoroughly readable. The stories are divided into some of the main Hemingway-an categories - love stories, war stories, and bull fighting. 153 pages.