I try to switch up my reading to keep things fresh, and have recently started having multiple books going at once (something I never did before, but I also haven't read this much with such regularity before - a side effect of the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendations on Screen Time). So at any given time I am reading:
- something scholarly and intelligent, which I can use to make myself sound smarter than I really am.
- something fun and kind of guilty - the equivalent to a sitcom. I can read it before bed when I'm ready to pass out, and it doesn't really matter if I don't digest it all at once.
- some kind of self-improvement book - right now it's How to Be A Productivity Ninja. I can read these in quick breaks when I get 10 minutes, or in little bites at lunch.
- an audiobook for the car and my baby-free walks. I used to be pretty good at keeping up with the news via NPR in the car, but I've pretty much stopped caring. I turned on Weekend Edition during our Saturday Morning Faff Around The Kitchen Time, and in the first five minutes I heard about Russia invading the Ukraine, and a former Olympian's murder trial starting. Same shit, different day. I went back to my audiobook.
So my guilty pleasure/sitcom book last week was Hollywood Forever by Christopher Herz. It's a novel about an out of work actor who flips out at a DMV, which sets in motion a whole bunch of dystopian stuff, ending in him starring in a reality tv show that actually does turn into reality. It reminded me a lot of Arthur Neresian, whom I loved about 10 years ago. Where Neresian captures the angst of NYC so perfectly, Herz gets all the fake-Hollywood-obsessed-with-image-and-twitter-followers stuff.
There were also two pretty steamy sex scenes, which, despite the fact that they were written by a man, were still pretty good and better than anything in 50 Shades. But we all know how I feel about that, and I won't go down that road again.
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