Alec Baldwin is key to all success...and other things I learned from Bossypants

I don’t typically read books written by celebrities, on principle.  I spent nearly 4 years and tens of thousands of dollars to receive a piece of paper stating I have mastered the English language.  I may still have to spend thousands hours more to be deemed worthy of publishing. So, I find it unfair that any Polizzi, Conrad, or Duff can publish a novel and make money simply because they already have money.

This passionate resistance is why it took over a year for me to succumb to the curiosity and peer pressure to read Tina Fey’s memoir/self-help guide/laugh factory, Bossypants.  Sometimes you have to get off your high horse to pan for gold. I’m glad I made the dismount for this gem.

This book is full of little crumbs of hilarity laced with wisdom where you’d least expect it.  Bossypants follows in the fashion of Fey’s screenplay for Mean Girls.  It brings attention to some ugly realities of being female, and then flips them upside down so we can laugh at them and at ourselves.  When it comes to being a lady boss, Tina demands her peers take her seriously without doing so herself.

Here are 5 things I already kind of knew but for which I found affirmation in Bossypants:

1.       “We should leave people alone about their weight,” and their looks, and their choices about childbearing and breast-feeding.   Fey asserts that social expectations for women are largely unattainable, unless you’re “Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”  So, just accept what works for you, which is sometimes skinny, and sometimes a little chubby, and sometimes not what works for the next girl.

2.       Career advancement is not an election for homecoming queen. You don’t automatically lose if another girl wins.  “People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel like you are in competition with one another… Don't be fooled. You're not in competition with other women. You're in competition with everyone.”

3.       “Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.”  If Tina Fey cried every time someone told her women just aren’t funny or that she is an overrated troll, she wouldn’t have the time to be the Emmy award-winning, money-making BOSS that she is. 

4.       Going home for Christmas is a good way to stay down-to-earth.  Fey and her family make an annual pilgrimage from Philadelphia to Youngstown every year.  They have a sweet Christmas, complete with a senile, chain-smoking Mamaw, and “hugs and kisses and pies and soup and ham and biscuits…”

5.       Age is nothing but a number. Turning 40 (or 25, or 30) is only enormous if you allow it to be.  What turning 40 means to Tina Fey:  “I need to take my pants off as soon as I get home. I didn’t used to have to do that. But now I do. “
 

Oh, and, although you may never find yourself in this position, in case you do, “…when Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your f***ing life."

News to me: Books

We all know by now that I love a good book. Heck, I even love a decent book. I even find some empathy for a bad one, simply because it tried.

Here are a few things I'm excited about in the world of books:

Illustrator Jillian Tamaki has teamed up with Penguin Books to release a new book series this fall which will feature these lovely embroidered covers. I've always known that I will collect books for my children when I have them, and what a treat these would be.

Shel Silverstein was one of my favorite writers as a kid, and still one of my all-time favorite poets. His poetry collections are the epitome of fun and whimsy with words. The LA Times recently announced that a collection of posthumous poems will be released by HarperCollins this fall.

I have gotten hooked on Good Reads.  It is essentially a social network for nerdy bookworms like yours truly.  You can let friends know what books you are currently reading, review books you've already read, create a to-read list, and exchange suggestions with your friends. When you finish a book, you can also take fun trivia quizzes or list your book in the book swap so you can trade it for something new!

What do you think about the new Penguin Threads Deluxe Classics? Do you put any thought into what your books look like?

Did you grow up on Shel Silverstein? What other books/authors remind you of your childhood? I want to hear from you!

Chronicle Books' Happy Haul-idays Contest

My friend Lacretia of ReadyHeart blog recently posted about Chronicle Books' Happy Haul-idays Contest, and I was ecstatic! Chronicle Books is giving away up to $500 worth of books to one blogger and one lucky blog commenter! We all know I love books, and free books are that much better.

All you have to do is post a list of books (valued at a total of $500 or less) on your blog by December 10th to enter.  If you win, you get the whole stack of books, and so does one person who commented on your post about the Haul-iday Contest post. That's it! You'll find my list below.  Make sure you comment to enter for your chance to win with me!

Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe

Tea & Crumpets

The Big Book of Potluck

Bon Appetit

Decorate

1000 Interior Details for the Home

Penny Saving Household Helper

Apartment Therapy Presents...

This Is My Best: Great Writers Share Their Best Works

Audrey Hepburn: International Cover Girl

Secret Lives of Great Authors

The Writer's Tool Box
IDEO Eyes Open: London
Paper + Craft
Little Book of Letterpress
Creative, Inc.
Work It: Visual Therapy's Guide to Your Ultimate Career Wardrobe
Fitness 9 to 5
Kitchen Sticky Notes
Thinking With Type
Writer's Workshop in a Book
The Observation Deck

Grand Total: 499.65

Ideal Bookshelf

Jane Mount over at Etsy has taken the ideas I wrote about in my last blog and translated them into visual art. 

Jane's Ideal Bookshelf series features customized, true-to-life paintings of the stacked spines of her clients' favorite, most influential titles.  These would be a thoughtful gift for the bookworm on your list this Christmas.

Here's a sample of one of the paintings:

What books would earn the spot on your Ideal Bookshelf? 

Do you think a person's ideal shelf can articulate a lot about his/her personality or journey?

More information about the series can be found at http://www.idealbookshelf.com/.

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.- James Bryce

I'm really loving having my own apartment.  Interior decorating has afforded me a surge of creativity lately.  There's just that something about "making a house a home" that makes one feel so unique and industrious.

This weekend, I ambitiously tackled those frustrating wordless instructions with the pictures of screws and panels labeled A-Z, and arrows pointing to ...whatever that thing is. (Obviously, maniacal, ingenious engineers were cackling as they drew up these diagrams, imagining silly right-brainers like me trying to decipher them.)  After some head-scratching, and second-guessing (why do I have 3 B screws left over? Did I miss something? Is this thing going to collapse when I put something on it?), I finally put together my bookcase.

I meticulously lined the shelves with the stacks of books that had previously been housed in cardboard boxes across the apartment. As I gingerly placed each one, I often thumbed through the worn pages and scanned the back-cover summaries.

I know it's cheesy and pitiful and nerdy, but I got a bit emotional as I shelved my collection of biographies, novels, short stories, and writing guides. I have lots of clothes and shoes and jewelry, but if I ever went broke, I'd sell those before my books.

I realized that my books represent a lot about my journey, what I've learned, and how I've become me.

Many of them were assigned readings for school, and I recall all of those analyses and reports I painstakingly cranked out over my years as an English major.  There are several in this group for which I'm thankful I was forced to read, like Louise Erdrich's Tracks, which was assigned by three professors, and the message in which I did not really comprehend until that third reading, when I was more mature and a little wiser. ;)

Maya Angelou's poetics have sung me to sleep many a night with a glass of wine and dreams of the stories I might one day tell about my own life-- struggles included--because, really, that's what makes a woman.

Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd be Cake got picked from the shelf at Barnes and Noble simply because, well who can resist that title? Oh, but we became so much more, that book and I, like lovers who never saw it coming.

Heck, even that laughable break-up survival guide that was passed on to me by another bitter, jaded-girl-convincing-herself-of-her inner-diva during my freshman year of college has a special place in my heart.  At the very least, it provided me with some much-needed comic relief when I felt the world was ending upon losing the "first true love "of all my 19 years.

These are just a short few of the many books that have shaped me. What is more therapeutic than reading a book and realizing that somebody, somewhere, in some point in time felt, said, did, failed, accomplished, loved, hated, and adored the same way you do, have, and will?

As a writer, I hope one day someone will line her shelves with bound pages of my own creation.  :)

Happy reading, my friends.