Fly me to the Moon

Just finished Fly me to the Moon by Alyson Noel this morning. While entertaining, it does not warrant in depth analysis.

Pros:
1. Book veers slightly from the standard chick lit story line by throwing in visits to Greece, Paris and Puerto Rico. This makes me feel slightly better about the fact that I'm basically reading garbage because somehow "travel" is involved and therefore makes the book (and me by association) more "cultured". Not really true, but still.
2. Main character has gay best friend and book contains just the right number of fag hag jokes. I am a sucker for this every time. Particularly if the gay friend is funny in a bitchy way. This one was.
3. It was entertaining, sometimes legitimately funny.
4. Hmmmm... that might be it.

Cons:
1. I don't like the way the author spells her name. Alyson with a Y? Noel with an umlaut? Annoying.
2. Rants about the hard life of a flight attendant were a little too angry, it became apparent Alyson was a former flight attendant with steam to blow off. (this was confirmed by reading her bio on the back jacket)
3. Said rants made me feel like an asshole for always leaving my garbage in the seat after flying.
4. I think I might finally be bored with main characters who make stupid decisions and how you can tell within like one chapter who she's going to end up falling in love with, and then you have to read like 200 pages waiting for HER to figure it out. It's hard to like the main character when she's stupid.

Introductions

One of my favorite places to go is Barnes and Noble. I know I should probably support local book stores, and I often do, but I'm not going to lie. I love Barnes and Noble. My favorite thing to do is walk through the entire fiction section and count how many books in each bookshelf segment I've read. I find this excercise soothing. I think most people find it annoying, so I mostly try to make this a solo activity.

Another thing I love to do is choose a big stack of books, find a chair, and read the first chapter of each book. Then I pick my favorite 3 to purchase. I think this is one of the reasons why I sometimes have a difficult time remembering what books I've read. That, and the fact that 80% of the books I read follow roughly the same plot - 30 something girl climbing career ladder meets dashing young man, falls in love after a frightful number of mishaps and near misses, then lives happily ever after. In my defense, there are usually some very important variations in this plot line. For example, sometimes the girls live in London and other times LA, sometimes they work in PR, while other times they are assistant dorm managers at made up Universities in New York (so I MAY have read the Heather Wells series - but it only took a day since the book was printed in size 22 font!), and when I really want to mix it up, sometimes the main character is a man.

Anyways. I plan to start logging the books I'm reading here. I'll tell you what I think of the books and if anyone actually reads this blog, you can share your opinions too. You can also recommend books you think I'd like. Lest you think I'm totally stupid and read nothing but crap, I feel I should point out that I did just finish The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and I hope to write about it here soon. Of course, I totally contradicted myself by immediately starting Fly me to the Moon by Alyson Noel, but if you can't love me anyways, then I don't really care.