True to my word, I put down Alice I Think and plan to never pick it up again. Instead I picked up the book closest to the top of the pile and started that instead.

(Tangent: this is a bad idea. I always end up reading the newest books and never get to the books on the bottom of the pile. Some of them have been at the bottom of the pile for years, and that is not an exaggeration. It also seems to always mean that I am reading contemporary fiction, romance novels, and children's books rather than the small mountain of classics lingering there near the bottom. I may never read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at this rate.)

So the book closest to the top of the pile was one I borrowed from Patti after Toronto Trek: The Man I Should Have Married by Pamela Satran. It is decidedly chicklit, published on a chicklit press, but it's good chicklit. This book is from the same press that published Pamie's book (which I really liked) and Getting Over Jack Wagner (which I tossed across the room and then returned to Borders, feeling that because I'd wasted my time reading it, I deserved my money back). So I was 50-50 with the Downtown Press books so far; reading this one is making me think they make more right choices than wrong.

This book won't change the world, but it's a good read. I stayed up past my bedtime last night trying to finish it. I never wanted to smack the heroine, like I did when I tried the Shopaholic books. It didn't make me want to smack myself, like the aforementioned GOJW. I like Kennedy (the lead character), I like her trash-talking teenage daughter Maya, and I like the honest portrayal of a woman who got married for every reason but the right one - because I've been there. That part of the story rang true to me. Er...rings, since I'm still reading it. I also found myself wanting to move into a house that Kennedy ends up living in, and I very rarely find myself that attracted to fictional settings.

Recommended, if you like this sort of thing. Faulkner it ain't.

I haven't had much time to read this summer, and it seems like I've been reading two books forever.

One is the second Thursday Next novel, Lost In A Good Book. I'd heard about the Next books (which began with The Eyre Affair for many months and was anxious to read them. Kymm gave me both books for my birthday and I read the first one in Ireland. I liked it, but I didn't go completely batty over it like most people I know. I thought it was in desperate need of a good editor. I am enjoying the second one a lot more - it reads much more cleanly - but I do feel like I am missing something. The Next books seem to be developing into a huge cult thing and I definitely feel like I am on the outside of it. They're clever enough; they're funny (chuckle in your head funny, not laugh out loud funny); I like Thursday. I just seem to be missing whatever it is that's making people batty about them.

The second book is called Alice I Think by Susan Juby. It's a Canadian young adult novel which was recently published here in hardcover (mine is a trade paperback). It looked funny and charming; in reality, it's bizarre and annoying. Alice is a teenager who's been homeschooled her whole life (with the exception of one week of first grade, during which she came to school dressed as a Hobbit) and she's going to be mainstreamed into a public school setting. Alice is, essentially, a giant freak who fulfills all the stereotypes about homeschooled kids and then some - she appears to have not paid attention or left her house at all for fifteen years. She gets the shit beat out of her by a public school kid who (we are supposed to believe) has hated her for a decade, ever since that first week of first grade; her mother is a total sage-burning hippie; her father seems more absent than not. The book is filled with one scene after another where Alice is shocked, shocked I tell you to discover the way people are doing things in today's society and still more scenes where she tries to either fit in or make her own way and fails miserably.

The book, too, fails miserably. I'm finding it loathsome. In fact, I don't think I'm going to finish it. Life's too short.

I TiVod some episodes of Coupling a few weeks ago, but because of the very busy summer, Greg and I just settled down to start watching them last night.

I don't watch a lot of comedy TV; for the most part I find it all kind of bland. I enjoy Friends sometimes but more for the character interactions; I rarely find it laugh out loud funny. I gave Will and Grace many chances but mostly I want to smack Grace and for a gay show, there certainly aren't any gay relationships, and while I loved Megan Mullally when I saw her on Broadway, her Karen voice just grates on my ears. Greg loves That 70's Show but I'm not fond of it; we both love The Simpsons but it stopped being really funny a few years ago. So I've tried the half-hour comedy format off and on over the last ten years or so, but for the most part, I feel like the sitcom peaked in the 80s and hasn't really been the same since.

The Brits usually get it right (Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Good Neighbors just to name three of my favorites), however, and Coupling is no exception.

Oh how we love Jeff. I would watch the show just for Jeff. Luckily the rest of the characters are equally good. It has taken a little longer to warm up to the girls, but the episodes we've seen so far have been more about the guys than the girls. The writing is terrific - we laughed out loud quite a bit, and that's my true measure for comedy. If I only chuckle in my head, or think huh, that was kinda amusing, then it's not successful to me. But if a show can make both Greg and I with our differing senses of what's funny laugh out loud not just once but ten times or more in thirty minutes - that's comedy gold, people.

We just bought the first season on DVD. Find it on your PBS station or BBC America while you can. See the original British version before NBC swoops in and blands it up like most American networks do when they rip off ideas from overseas.