Biblio Reviews

If not for the humor in the exposition of her epistolary novel, I'd have never read, much less bought Maria Semple's bestseller,  Where'd You Go, Bernadette  (2012). A satire of the Seattle-based super rich and privileged, I found myself not liking many of the characters because they typified so many of my stereotypes of the super rich: delusional, entitled, competitive, paranoid, and money/power/status obsessed. Bernadette, a twenty-year transplant to Seattle and supposed genius architect, suffered a mental breakdown that has crippled her for the past twenty years. Seemingly disenchanted with people and life, Bernadette is reclusive. This, of course, creates conflict with the parents of her daughter's (Bree) Montessori school who find Bernadette to be off-putting due to her lack of active involvement and participation in the school community and the other parents.  Audrey Griffin, Bernadette's next-door neighbor and nemesis, is the catalyst of much of the conflict...

Rabid fandom is one reason I've yet to watch  Titanic  and never got into  Friends,   Lost,  among many other highly successful films and TV shows. Instead, I tend to dedicate my viewing time to the underdogs, which is to say that a lot of the shows that I do like tend to get cancelled, i.e.  Arrested Development, Life, Chicago Code, Human Target, Men of a Certain Age.  To date,  The Good Wife  is the only one of my faves to have escaped that fate.  With that said, you can imagine how resistant I was to reading Rainbow Rowell, the darling of CBReaders. However, because my passion for reading is stronger than my passion for film/TV viewing, I broke down a couple of months ago and read her debut novel,  Attachments  (2011). In the end, the novel was a satisfying, nostalgic quick read. Much of my enjoyment came from the atypical male protagonist, Lincoln O'Neill, a diffident, non-alpha romantic lead. Set in 1999,...