The Books of September

I do know that it's October 10th already, yet, I cannot not write about the books I enriched my ever-growing library with in September. The first month of the beloved Autumn brought me five books:

• Empire Falls by Richard Russo
• Lipstick Jungle by Candance Bushnell
• Good Wives by Louisa May Alcott
• In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner
• The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster 

With the exception of The Book of Illusions, I must thank all of these to BookMooch. I believe I wrote about the very first package I got via Bookmooch, then Empire Falls was followed by three other books. I am still yet to read Russo's novel, but hopefully I will get around it during Autumn break. I have kept bumping into this book lately, so I grew curious about it, then I looked it up, and realized that I have already seen the TV film it was adapted into and pretty much liked it. (Leading characters were played by Paul Newman (!!), Philip Seymour Hoffman, Helen Hunt, Ed Harris, et al. Sounds good, doesn't it?) ...And then I just could not resist mooching Empire Falls.

A few weeks ago I started watching Lipstick Jungle, the TV series. At first I found it rather odd, yet somehow I got hooked and could hardly stop watching... As you can see it is written by Candance Bushnell who is also the author of Sex and the City. You may remember that I read that book during summer, wrote a pretty long post about it, and basically loathed it all the way through. I still believe that that novel (?) is nothing but a pain in the you-know-where, but since everyone deserves a second chance, I thought I would try another one of Bushnell's works. (Had I not given another chance to Kerouac, I would never have read On the Road... What a shame it would have been!) I did a little bit of research before mooching Lipstick Jungle though, and learned that it wasn't a bunch of short short stories thrown into a pile like Sex and the City but a "proper novel" with one big storyline and three main characters. Those characters I have already grew fond of while watching the tv show, so I wasn't putting my money on a (very) dark horse... I am currently  reading it, and it's way better than Sex and the City. (A more proper and longer review should come some time during next week.)

Louisa May Alcott's Good Wives is a novel I had wanted to put my hands on for such a long time! It is the sequel of Alcott's best known novel Little Women which is one of my favorite books. I have read Little Women at least half a dozen times and will probably read it for another half  because it is such a beautiful, heart-warming story. (If you haven't read it, you really should!) But before I got this book for my 15th birthday, it took me such a long time to find out what the exact title and who the author was! I only remembered watching the film about ten years ago, but I could not remember the title... Then I learned that Little Women was Joey Potter's favorite book in Dawson's Creek because of her resemblance to Joe March. (Yes, I am one of those geekish girls who grew up loving Dawson's Creek and having Joey Potter as their (sort of) role model... Along with Gilmore Girls, DC pretty much defined my teenagerhood.) And that's how I found out that the author is Louisa May Alcott while the title is Little Women. LMA wrote a number of sequels to LW, and Good Wives is the first of them. I can hardly wait to read it! Hopefully it is as good as LW and I will love GW just as much... and then I am planning to get the rest of the series. I adore the character of Jo March so much!

In Her Shoes is yet another chic-lit novel, but I just can't help myself, I love chic-lit just as I love the big classics... Chic-lit is my guilty pleasure, I guess... I have been getting too much of it lately though, so I will put it aside for a little while and I will read more serious volumes in the next few months. The reason why I mooched In Her Shoes is because I saw the movie a few years ago (starring Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz) and liked it quite much. Although you should never judge a book by its movie, I do believe that if I like the movie adaptation I cannot really find the book it's based on that bad, can I?

And finally, The Book of Illusions I did not mooch, but purchased, for this is compulsory reading for one of the courses I am taking this semester, titled "The Chemistry of Passion: Eroticism in Contemporary American Fiction". The reading list is really interesting (in a good way), we will discuss some works of Auster, Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Bret Easton Ellis, and Annie Proulx. Shame or not, I haven't read anything by Auster, in fact, I had not even heard about him before. Well, this fact is about to change!:)