(no subject)

[jfb]

rollerboogie reminded me, I keep watching movies that seem to have accidental companion books, and forgetting to mention the books here. So: If you like movies about spelling bees, you might also like Myla Goldberg's deep, weird novel Bee Season, about a family that becomes fragmentedly obsessed with, among other things, spelling. Times review, publisher's excerpt and interview, Powell's order page.

And if you like stories about women playing punk rock in L.A. but Prey for Rock and Roll's angst isn't lighthearted enough for you, I recommend Jen Sincero's Don't Sleep with Your Drummer, about a 28-year-old who quits her job to form a band misnamed after a PJ Harvey song. It's funny and fun and makes you get how music might be worth all the indignities and iniquities of the music business. No Times review for this one, but here's some review I found with Google, and here's Powell's. You can buy a downloadable version to read on your PDA, which sounds like a terrible idea to me, but if you want to experiment, this might be a good book for it.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I loved Bee Season.
Have you read Amiee Bender's "an invisible sign of her own"? It reminds me a lot of Goldberg.

[jfb.livejournal.com]

I haven't. I'm gradually making my way through her book of stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. I really liked "Fugue" when I found it in Absolute Disaster, an anthology of L.A. stories, but I'm finding the Aimee Bender collection, well, mixed. The novel does sound intriguing though.