Candy Girl by Diablo Cody

I'm 104% sure that Juno is the best movie I've seen in a long, long time. I loved that the characters talked and acted and looked like real teenagers, and that the humor in the movie was true and notthe product of outlandish,  ridiculous situations. Not that I don't appreciate absurdity at the right times, but Juno could achieve the right tone - whether it was comedy or drama - by sticking to reality.

Most of the awesomeness of the film has to come from Diablo Cody's script (for which she won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). I heard she had also written a book a few years ago, Candy Girl, about the time she spent being a stripper in Minnesota. I got this one at the library, too, and read it very quickly.

Cody's style in the book is very similar to what you can see and hear in Juno, especially the vocabulary. It starts off a little oppressive, a little bit pretentious, but the farther you read all the funky word combos aren't so noticeable. 

Seeing as how this is a book about stripping, there were definitely parts that get pretty graphic. But Cody writes with such matter-of-fact frankness that it doesn't cross the line into tasteless - at least for me. And this is coming from someone who skips over the too-sexy parts in romance novels. 

A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb

I confess. I like the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. Actually, I flove them. Those things are like crack. Please don't think any less of me. I have also searched through many lists of "If You Like Twilight ..." and found this book popping up on a lot of them. 

I can see why it's lumped together with the Twilight books in the paranormal romance category. Kind of spooky, but mostly just an unusual romance. The two characters who fall in love in Light are both ghosts who come to inhabit the bodies of teenagers who are "empty," whose souls have fled. 

I don't usually like ghost stories, but Whitcomb's  fluid prose just sucked me in. She can do dreamlike and harsh reality very well without the tone ever seeming choppy. 

This is the first time in a long while that I have finished a book in a day. This is both a compliment and a complaint - the story is so engrossing but the book is pretty short - unlike the bloated Twilight series.

Of course, I'm also a bit shallow when it comes to picking books to read: This cover sure is pretty.

Another Time, Another Love by Vivian Schurfranz (with some American Girl nostalgia)

In my quest for easy, fun reads, I've of course tried out romance novels. I found this one in the YA section at my library. I was drawn to is because of the cover - duh, historical fiction for the win. I grabbed it and checked it out and started reading it today before it really set in that this is one of those lame time-traveling romance novels. The main character isn't even from the Revolutionary War - she's some inane Mary Sue with a penchant for stirrup leggings and saying "mustn't." I mean, okay, I'll give the author some slack on the clothing choices (the book was written in 1995), but it's the fact that these are always discussed in such excruciating detail that bugs me. I don't care when you write a book - in a few years some of that stuff is going to be horrifically dated and it's going to take a reader out of the story. This book was so overbearing about it I didn't even get a chance to get into the story in the first place. All I really cared about was the Revolutionary War stuff, honestly. Maybe this is a good book if you like The Patriot fan-fiction in book form with the convenient time-traveling mechanism so you can still have high school and mid-90s fashion trauma. 

So, after becoming exasperated with all of Cathy's (that's the Mary Sue) whining about her boyfriend who spends all his time volunteering at a literacy center and not taking her to Olive Garden, I skipped ahead through the book to find the historical fun that surely must ensue (based on the cover, anyway). Um, well, it gets worse - Cathy just goes back in time for little bits. A ball here, some tea parties there. I never got into it enough to figure out how exactly she travels back to the 1770s with her hottie ghost friend Edward (who's British and has a sexy accent, natch). 

    

You know what would be ideal for me? Grown-up American Girl books. Especially Felicity. She and Ben the apprentice should totally hook up. I tried to find some fan fiction a while ago in this vein - unfortunately it was fan fiction, so I couldn't stand it. 

It's because of the American Girl books that I'm kind of obsessed with colonial and Revolutionary War-era America anyway - the only real reason I picked up this Schurfranz novel in the first place. In-between 2nd and 3rd grade I would read all the books in a character's series in one day. I remember sitting on my bed for hours, chain-reading the Addy and Felicity and Molly books. But not Samantha, because she was rich and boring - and all my friends had prissy, frilly Samantha dolls, which didn't really go well with my fairly rustic Felicity Scenes & Settings. And none of them knew what stays were or what side-saddle meant, or how to politely refuse tea in case they were protesting taxation without representation. All the Samantha Parkington girls knew were the various ways to create calling cards and what it was like to read in an automobile. Pffft. (Oh, and how to rescue orphans and how to teach people to read. But ... yeah.)

I dunno, I might even break out my little boxed set of Felicity this summer. I'm pretty sure they aren't as spectacular as I remember (especially with only 75 words on a page), but still. 

Nostalgia beats time-traveling Mary-Sues any day.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

I've wanted to read this for a long time, and finally grabbed it at the library last week. I was expecting something kind of light and accessible (as much as you can be when talking about dead bodies), but I was really pleasantly surprised by how engrossing it was. Pun kind of intended there with the "gross" part. Har har.

I've been on a slightly morbid kick lately - not full-on gore, ick, but I have been reading some young adult fiction (Twilight, A Certain Slant of Light) with paranormal elements. I figured Stiff would be good to read to get all that romantic-death stuff out of my head. 

Despite Roach's frequent LOL-inducing moments (at one point she decides to refer to fly larvae as "haciendas" instead of "maggots" to make the scene she's describing less cringe-inducing to the reader and herself), the overall tone balances morbid curiosity with the necessary respect. Roach's topics range from "willed body" programs that provide cadavers for anatomy classes to the future of cremation - an intriguing process euphemistically called "ecological funeral" (the deceased's body used as fertilizer for a memorial tree - but so far this has only happened in Sweden).

I'm a pretty squeamish person, but there was little in this book that crossed the line for me. The sensory imagery wasn't really the heart the book's substance anyway - the best parts were Roach's discussions with those people who make a living working with dead people. Dissection specialists, plastination experts (the process used in the BodyWorlds exhibit), or funeral home directors all have methods of creating emotional distance between a body and a living person - just so they can go to work everyday. 

If you want something informative, witty, and engaging, definitely pick this up. Chances are even the striking cover photograph will be a great conversation starter.