LOL Online Dating

Love @ First Site - Jane Moore (Broadway Books, 2005)

This is an advance ready copy, just fyi. I assume it's close enough to the final product.

So, I really needed me some British chick lit. I miss Bridget Jones. This seemed promising. It's got the right ingredients: 30something, goofy gay male friends and sassy female friends, hilariously awful work environment, frustrating dating set up, etc. But I spent a lot of the book thinking that it was fine, but.... It was missing something. And the love story depends on a lot of scenes that are not only not in the novel, but don't seem to have time to be in the novel. When would they have happened? Hmm?

But then I got to the final few pages, and it got seriously adorable. Problems galore, but awwww. So. Cute. Anything more I say gives it all away. And I mean, you'll know what's going to happen, obviously. But still. Awww.

So it didn't really fill my chick lit need. But it was okay. Next up?

This is water.

I have started DFW's The Pale King. As a result, he is much in my mind lately. (He is also much on the Twitter. Everywhere. Goodness.)

So I am listening to the Kenyon commencement speech from 2005. So powerful. Watch.

Part 2

National Library Week

I enjoyed the heck out of this NPR blog post about how awesome libraries are. It's a lot about how it's free, but there was also this:

In particular, I found that all those cheap romance paperbacks were beaten, mangled, shaken and stirred. Not so that you couldn't read them, but just so you knew they'd been read a lot. Oddly, I found this ... comforting. I picked up some of those horribly abused books and felt like I was putting my hands on tangible populism. Those books are there because they're read, and it actually made kind of a good reminder that the library was trying to help, that the idea was to serve readers.

And anyone who manages to check out DFW's Infinite Jest and three Nora Roberts novels on a single visit deserves applause for sheer awesomeness. (Also for being quite a bit like me, although I needed my own IJ copy, and have different guilty pleasure authors.)

A likely match

Sex, Lies, and Online Dating - Rachel Gibson (Avon Books, 2006)

Lenny and Eunice were really bringing me down. This totally beautiful and heartfelt story, no matter how satirically presented, was a little more than I could handle. Especially because it was, as promised, "super sad."

So I needed another love story to read in tandem. Enter Rachel Gibson. She writes contemporary romance novels, and first caught my eye (in a Booklist capsule review maybe?) because at least a few of her titles center around the fictitious NHL Seattle Chinooks. Yay hockey players! This one does not, but our protagonist is a fan of the minor-league team in Boise.

In addition to liking hockey, Lucy is a mystery writer who has decided to tackle the subject of a serial killer who meets men on dating sites and then sends them to their death via erotic asphyxiation. So she has to date some for research. The trouble is that someone in the city is acting out her book, even while it's still being written. Which leads her to Quinn, a cop who is dating around in hopes of drawing out the killer, who is, obviously, Lucy. Right? Blah blah immediate physical connection, growing emotional attachment, annoyance at lies and concerns about how the other one feels, etc. In short, the perfect antidote to Lenny and Eunice. So just what I needed.

What can love do?

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart (Random House, 2010)

Once upon a time, I really enjoyed The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Gary Shteyngart in general. But you know how you get lazy about following the stuff you like?

So over the summer I read excerpts from SSTLS in the New Yorker. And that's how it ended up on my book list. Although it then took, what? 6 months to actually get my hands on it. But here it is.

In short: dystopian future. Shteyngart as always does a great job of creating a world that is recognizable and yet totally different. The US is collapsing, and is pure consumerism and cell phones and rankings and .... man, I hate doing these overviews in any sort of way that makes sense. So screw it. Let me skip to the interesting parts.

Lenny's diaries are interspersed with the e-mails and chat transcripts (although they have different names) of Eunice, the girl he falls madly in love with and who, for her own reasons, finds her way to him. What makes them so fascinating and heart-breaking is how much they cannot communicate at all, how little we can actually express to the people we love, the ones we want to understand us most. And how little sense life makes, even at the best of times, and certainly not in a country falling apart.

Some moments:

• "keep a diary, to remember who we were, because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities ..."
• a passage I cannot find about Lenny's attempt to spend an entire week without books .... this in a world where no one reads, and no one has read for decades. And yet, despite this, the Naughty Librarian look continues to be desirable.
• "the clarity of being alive during conclusive times, the joy of being historically important by association." [I remember feeling this - although far more dread - on 9/11, the wish that I could have lived when history wasn't happening.]
• on bipartisanship's dangers: "When we lost touch with how much we really hate each other, we also lost the responsibility for our common future."
• "I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world." And I felt so much weight on much shoulders when I read that. And then, this lovely lovely line:
• "The fading light is us, and we are , for a moment so brief it can't even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful."

Lenny and Eunice. They're each terribly flawed, but their flaws make them truly real and human. It's especially noticeable in Eunice, who starts out such a cipher, such a creature of this brave, unhappy new world. Lenny sees depths in her, and we don't. Turns out he was right, just not in the way he expected.