Porn for WomenChicken Soup for the Working Mom's Soul - Jack Canfield - read by a middle-aged black woman who looked so tired, I actually misread the title at first to read the 'hardworking mom's soul.' The 'chicken soup for the soul' series are well known, and Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield now have hundreds of titles under the inspirational and motivational Chicken Soup umbrella. They've gotten so huge, that this company has co-branded with Coke and NASCAR, is now worth billions and counts greeting cards and pet food as part of their product line. Inspirational and motivational pet food and race cars??? Thinking way beyond the box is why some people are stinking rich and the rest of us, are not.
God's Armor Bearer: How to Serve God's Leaders - Terry Nance - This is a motivational book for Christians, particularly those called to the ministry.
Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer - Fourth in the teenage vampire romance series, also known as the 'Twilight Saga.' Big Joe overheard two beefy guys in the East Village one evening moaning about how their girlfriends had dragged them to the Twilight movie, under the guise of it being a horror flick. Funny, I've never had any urge to drag Big Joe or any previous boyfriend to a chick flick. In fact I'm deeply embarrassed by my penchant for the chick flick genre. It's so cheap, so non-intellectual, so junk food, so enjoyable. Romance movies are porn for women. Not all women mind you, but a large number. Just give us a hot troubled guy with killer cheekbones and soulful eyes, who's had many women but none who've been able to help him, change him, love him the way the heroine (whom we identify with) in the film does. And he sees her (us) and loves her like he's never loved anyone else before. And then off they ride into the sunset on his motorbike. Disgusting, right? Kind of like the 'money shot' in men's porn. Ah well. This is why women and men are different. Excepting gay men who can appreciate both cheesy romance and explicit pornographic films. I'm not sure what does it for lesbians, filmwise, having lost touch with my lesbian friends of my youth. Any dykes out there who care to weigh in on this?
Fasting - Jentezen Franklin - Oh boy. Yet another minister author. Although interestingly, this one is about biblical fasting. Forget the South Beach Diet, or Atkins. Try God.
There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America - Alex Kotlowitz - Despite the fact that this book was named by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important books of the century and was made into a film with Oprah Winfrey, I've never heard of it until now. The book "chronicles two years in the lives of two boys, Lafeyette and Pharoah, struggling to survive in Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex disfigured by crime and neglect." Sounds heavy, but worth picking up a copy.
The Secret of Chinese Pulse Diagnosis - Bob Flaws - read by a white hipster girl. In 1982, Bob and his wife Honora, founded Blue Poppy Press in Boulder, Colorado, in order to publish Bob's first book on Chinese medicine, Path to Pregnancy. Aside from attending Shanghai College of Chinese Medicine, teaching himself to read and write Chinese and being a founder and president of a number of acupuncture associations, Bob is also an avid motorcycle rider. Being a fan and practitioner of herbal medicine and homeopathy, I'm inclined to pick this book up. However although I have a thirst for knowledge and have started learning many things, due to time constraints and a short attention span, I have left many projects unfinished. So my guitar collects dust in the corner, the scarf I was knitting is still only a square of yarn, my perl and cgi tutorial books are now outdated, and Little Joe's baby book is still just a bunch of unorganized photos in labeled envelopes. So this one's going to have to remain on the back burner for the moment.
The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold - I read this author's first novel, The Lovely Bones, but unlike many others, I was not terribly moved nor impressed. Which makes me not too interested in her second. This book, about "a professional art-class model named Helen Knightly, the divorced mother of two grown children — (who) murder(s) her mother in graphic fashion, .... also describes her father’s bloody suicide, relates the story of the hit-and-run killing of a young boy and eerily alludes to the time her mother dropped Helen’s infant grandson on his head," was trashed in the NY Times and various other reviews, while Amazon.com readers give it 2 and half stars. Not terribly promising.
The Camino - Shirley Maclaine - read by a Latina office lady. According to an interview with Ms.Maclaine in the holistic magazine, Share Guide, "The Camino, is about a famous pilgrimage that has been taken by people for centuries called the Santiago de Compostela Camino across northern Spain. It is done with the intent to find one's deepest spiritual meaning and resolutions regarding conflicts in Self." Ms.Maclaine has written several autobiographical books about spirituality, but for me I just love her best as the hopeless romantic taxi dancer, Charity Hope Valentine, in the Bob Fosse film from the sixties, Sweet Charity.
A Hopeless Romantic - Harriet Evans - read by a pasty white girl in one of those shapeless knitted hats that look like a shower cap. Speaking of hopeless romantics, I wonder what this women's porn book is about. And I wonder at the bravery of the woman who unabashedly was reading this trash on the train. I would only read something like this this in the bathroom with the door locked.
As I've left this book section for so long due to Little Joe's Christmas break, I've still got six more books to review. Part two, tomorrow. I think I'll go reread Bridget Jones Diary on the toilet before going to bed. Good night all.
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