Loved it. I especially like the strong female character Amy. She’s one of those geniuses who’s too smart for her own good. Smart, neurotic, driven.
Here’s my favorite passage from Amy:
I was told love should be unconditional. That’s the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? I am supposed to love Nick despite all his shortcomings. And Nick is supposed to love me despite my quirks. But clearly, neither of us does. It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times. Unconditional love is an undisciplined love, and as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous.
I appreciate her unconventional, but important message. For example, just because women are married shouldn’t give them free license to eat a bunch of twinkies and hoho’s. Yet you see this happening all the time. You have to care about your appearance. You want to be confident and sexy, not just for your husband, but for yourself too. Marriage should be a commitment to be your best self in honor of your spouse, but the way most people think of it, it’s like, this is what you’re stuck with!
Anyhow, I found that message to be refreshing and different. I liked the main character Amy, but I also liked how the chapters flip-flopped between Amy and her husband Nick trying to one-up each other. Drama!
Click on the image of the book to buy it on Amazon.
This was a book club pick: Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.” I rarely read autobiographies or biographies in general, but this one is stand-out. It beats Jeannette Walls’s “The Glass Castle” and Gabrielle Hamilton’s “Blood, Bones & Butter” which I both enjoyed. The reason “Wild” is so good is because of the writing. Cheryl Strayed is a damn good writer. Carefully-crafted, insightful, it’s some of the best writing I’ve read in a while. I dog-earned so many pages where I thought she did a phenomenal job of capturing the experience, the emotion, and what she was learning from it. It’s the story of her at 26 years old in personal turmoil, coping with her mother’s death, a divorce, and drug abuse. She decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail and details how the experience changes her life.
