Year 5, week 6: Jenny Lawson books

Furiously Happy
By Jenny Lawson

I listened to this book forever ago (last November) and I laughed all the way through it. I had kept seeing this book everywhere and I just finally had to check it out. I didn't know anything about Jenny Lawson and had never read her blogs so it was a total surprise what the book would be like. Well it was a pleasant surprise. Jenny suffers from a handful of metal illness and many odd health issues, which all sounds so depressing but she is so hilarious that she makes you laugh all the way through it. She has a collection of animals that have been stuffed, and are posed in the weirdest positions and she calls them her service animals. The book is a set of essays and I can't recommend this book enough. I don't know why I never posted about it before.

Broken (in the Best Possible Way)
By Jenny Lawson

I read this book last month while packing and never got around to writing about it. If you haven't read anything by Jenny Lawson then you have been missing out. I knew I liked Furiously Happy when I read it and so I thought I would listen to something light hearted while packing. This book is her most recent, and happens to deal with some much darker of her depression and health issues. There are still silly parts that made me laugh, but definitely more thought provoking then the first of her books I listened to. I would still definitely recommend this one, especially on audiobook because she recorded it in her closet during the COVID-19 pandemic lock down.

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened
Book by Jenny Lawson

This book was her first book and strangely enough it's the third book I read of her's. I really I wish I had read this one first because while all of her books are very biographical, this one is the most memoir like. In this book we learn all about how insanely crazy her family was growing up. You learn about her meeting and marrying her husband and the birth of their daughter. This book was also funny in parts, but again I felt really bad for her for how oddly she was raised and how her mental health has thrown her for a curve ball over and over again. If I'm being honest this was my least favorite of the three of her books. I would still recommend the book because there are some funny parts.

Year 5, week 5: Dr. Mutter's Marvels

This week's book:
Dr. Mutter's Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine
By Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

I would never, ever have read this book if it wasn't for my reading challenge group. 

This book is about how surgeons used to do their jobs on their patients hundreds of years ago. At the time patients weren't put under before "surgery", and everything was dirty in the operating room. After the surgeries were done, the patient would be taken home right after in a filthy carriage. 

The book focuses on a doctor named Thomas Dent Mutter. Dr. Mutter thought patients needed pre and post care after surgery, so he would work with the patients before to make sure they were truly ready for surgery, and then he wanted recovery rooms for his patients as well for post surgery. He trained in France and used what he learned to create different kinds of plastic surgery for burn victims. Mutter also changed the way teachers taught their students, instead of just lecturing and giving one large test, he would ask questions and give little quizzes to make sure his students understood the material. 

The book could become dry, and let's be honest it does every so often, and then the author would drop some story about a doctor that killed three people during one surgery (the patient and two of his helpers), or someone had a forty-five pound scrotum tumor. Where Dr. Mutter was compassionate and ahead of his time in surgery and his teaching style, there was also Dr. Miegs who was a "gynecologist" of sorts and was creepy. 

Miegs treated women subhuman and just gives off yucky vibes the whole book. He trained his students to put leeches directly on women's uterus. There were a few chapters all about abortions at the time and how truly horrible doctors were to women, which with all that is going on with Texas right now it hit a little close to home. He made a large speech that stated he wasn't a fan of masters raping their slaves at the time, not because rape is a truly horrible act, but because it muddied the pure Aryan blood to mix races. He also didn't trust ether either; he went as far as to actually kill many sheep by overdosing them in front of many classes to show that it wasn't right to let patients feel the pain during surgeries. When sanitizing surgical tools and being clean became something that doctors actually started caring about Miegs was on the wrong side of history again. 

It should not be a surprise that Mutter was a very clean well put together man that was always keeping his workspace clean, completely thought having pain free surgeries would be a great idea, and never had slaves and would only hire free men while making sure they were paid well. Mutter reminded me a bit of Alexander Hamilton is some ways. Both of these men watched their loved ones die dreadful deaths at early ages and seemed to have a fire for what they thought they needed to do before they both died too soon. 

Even though there are sections that can be sort of squeamish, I would definitely recommend this book. It reads like fiction when it's actual history. 

Year 5, week 4: The Disaster Artist

This week's book:
The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made
By Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell

So last month for my reading challenge, one of the prompts was "read a memoir that was turned into a movie". I was struggling hard to think of a match for this prompt, until I came upon The Disaster Artist. If you don't know what this book/movie is, then you are lucky/missing out. 

In the early 2000s, one of the worst movies in history was made, and it was called The Room. The movie makes literally no sense and it was written, directed and starred by the same man: Tommy Wiseau. My husband and his friends have a love for this film, and so when I saw there was a book written by one of the stars of the film, I thought I should listen to the book via the library's audiobook selection. I had made it about an hour in when the hubby said he might want to listen to it as well. So that's what we did while I nursed the little one at night. Since we listened to the audiobook and the author read the book, we were about to hear him do his Tommy Wiseau imitation, which was pretty dead on to be honest. Tommy Wiseau's speech pattern/accent is downright silly. 

I'll say it wasn't for me to be honest, but then again I don't love the film and I have serious questions about who and what is wrong with Tommy Wiseau (what most of the book is about). But if you are a fan of the original film, or the film adaptation they made of this book (starring James Franco and his crew) I would definitely check this book out. It's chock full of back stories and such. 

Notes from the Hubby: “Oh hi, Mark!”

I watched the film adaptation of The Disaster Artist before reading this book, but it was still… is fascinating the right word? Well, I’ll use it. It was fascinating to hear these behind-the-scenes stories about a movie so utterly awful, yet you just can’t look away. Granted, I’ve only seen The Room via Rifftrax (which I highly recommend if you can), but watching “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” is a strange experience. Despite the craziness of the film, the stories about its production are somehow even crazier.

If you have seen The Room, or at least laughed at some of its often quoted lines, I recommend reading The Disaster Artist.

Year 5, week 3: 28 Summers

This week's book:
28 Summers
By Elin Hilderbrand

I have been seeing books by this author for a while and I had never picked one of her books up. This past week my online book group had a buddy read for the book 28 Summers. The book for the most part takes place on Labor Day weekend, so it's a perfect post for today… Labor Day. 

I don't want to say I hated the book, because I did finish the audiobook, but my God, did it make me mad. Have you ever heard of the movie Same Time Next Year? Because the book and that film have almost the same plot. Both the film and the book are about two people meeting once a year to have a weekend of romance, but in both stories the people are married/involved with other people. The whole book is so much more dramatic than it needs to be. If two people love each other as much as the two characters do in the novel, why in the holy heck would you not just spend the rest of your life with them instead of some overly complicated once a year love affair for almost thirty years? 

I have never been a fan of Hallmark/Lifetime style stories in books or films, so I just don't think this book was my cup of tea.  

Year 5, week 2: The Guncle

This week's book:
The Guncle
By Steven Rowley

I saw this book somewhere listed by someone online a while back, and I thought it sounded like a fun read when I looked up the plot. 

A gay uncle, a.k.a. Guncle, watches his niece and nephew after a death in the family. It turns out there the book deals with many more dark issues than the cover and plot seems to pitch. The book is still kind of a feel-good novel, and I could definitely see it being made into a movie or TV show. 

I really did enjoy the novel.