Possible Side Effects is another collection of short story memoirs by Augusten Burroughs. The material in this book is all new, and not found in any of his other books, which never fails to astonish me. How many crazy things can one person have happen in their life, after all? Apparently there is no limit.
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The term “Magical Thinking” is defined by the Free Online Medical Dictionary as: irrational belief that one can bring about a circumstance or event by thinking about it or wishing for it.
You can find a better definition of Magical Thinking on one of the first pages of Burrough’s book. Burroughs uses the classic childhood example of “step on a crack and break your mother’s back”.
Continue Reading “Magical Thinking: True Stories – by Augusten Burroughs”
I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary that you read Burroughs’ first memoir before reading Dry, because Burroughs does a great job of filling in the blanks just enough to make the reader get what he’s referring to. I still highly recommend reading Running with Scissors first, anyway, to get the full story.
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Your childhood, no matter how bad or crazy you think it was, will seem tame in comparison to what Augusten Burroughs experienced. Running with Scissors is one of those memoirs that makes all of us with “bad childhoods” feel a little more “normal”.
Burroughs writes so honestly, so intimately, censoring nothing, that it makes the reader feel like they’ve been sitting inside his head while these events were being lived.
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Somewhere in Nevada, science has gone terribly wrong. The book Prey can be described as a science-fiction/thriller.
Jack, a self described “househusband”, stays home and takes care of his three children. Julia, his wife, is a scientist, working on a top secret project that Jack (and the other spouses) know almost nothing about. It turns out that no one, not even the scientists in charge of this project, were very well informed about what it was they were up against.
Continue Reading “Prey – by Michael Crichton”
Luca Bastardo lives on the streets of Florence, Italy, in the early 1300’s. He has no knowledge of who his parents were, or how he became lost from them. All he knows is that he is different from the other homeless boys he befriends.
His hair is blond (and a little red) and everyone else has brown hair. He is clearly smarter than the rest of the children, as well as many of the adults. Luca is strikingly beautiful, and being so brings him much grief.
Continue Reading “Immortal – by Traci L. Slatton”
If you are at all familiar with the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, you will enjoy the parts of Loving Frank that describe not only his buildings, but also what he was thinking about when he designed them. You can almost see the buildings taking shape.
Continue Reading “Loving Frank – by Nancy Horan”
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about Nineteen Minutes. I suspect I am supposed to, so maybe that is ok. Nineteen Minutes is about a school shooting, a subject that makes both scares me and interests me at the same time. The title comes from how long it took for the whole shooting incident to occur, from start to end.
Continue Reading “Nineteen Minutes – by Jodi Picoult”
A Prayer for Owen Meany is a book that many students are assigned to read as part of the course work for their high school English class. It is also a book that tends to get banned.
Owen Meany is a small kid with a voice that is so bizarre that people stop and stare at him when he speaks. It sounds like a permanent scream. Owen is also brilliant, and wise beyond his years, and, like most kids who are a combination of highly intelligent and odd, he gets picked on all through childhood.
Continue Reading “A Prayer for Owen Meany – by John Irving”
The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done is a book of layers. Annie, Jake, and Mason are closer than best friends, and have been since they first met when they were very young. These are some extremely complex friendships.
From early on, it’s clear that Mason feels the need to be loved “the most” by both Annie and Jake. He is the most daring of the three, and his dares and threats direct the action of the group more often than not.
Continue Reading “The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done – by Ursula Hegi”