Catching up, yet again

It's a red-letter day: I picked up three books I had requested at the library today. Yay! So my reading menu in the next couple of weeks will include Jennifer Weiner's Best Friends Forever (Weiner is the queen of brainy-yet-breezy chick lit), Jonathan Tropper's This is Where I Leave You (good buzz on that one), and Trenton Lee Stewart's The Mysterious Benedict Society (a kid's book, but it seems interesting). In addition to those, my fantastic almost-lawyer friend lent me Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Pulitzer Prize winner) and Jen Lancaster's Bright Lights, Big Ass (doesn't the title just say it all?). I'm thrilled to have a packed shelf, but this means that my Ulysses project might have to fall by the waistline (as a former colleague of my mother's would say). I still want to read it a bit at a time (unless it just grabs me and I can't put it down), but with so much highly anticipated reading at my fingertips, I just don't know how that's going to work out. I'm still going to read it, though--I mean it!

Wow, I think I OD'd on parentheses in that last paragraph. (Such a shame.) Anyway, I've finished the following books in the last week or so:

• Miss Harper Can Do It, by Jane Berentson: As I mentioned in my last post, the first half of this book is fan-freaking-tastic. Annie Harper is a young elementary school teacher who is attempting to write a memoir during her boyfriend's deployment. Her voice is so engaging, and I could really relate to her. She does not feel like an army girlfriend; I never really felt like an army wife. On p. 8, she describes the day that David, her boyfriend, left:

"That morning there had been this big flag-waving, yellow-ribbon, send-off hoopla. I hated it. I hated the other women waving yellow ribbons and white handkerchiefs. Actual cloth handkerchiefs! Who even uses those anymore?"

When Mark left for Iraq, I went through something similar. Someone was walking around passing out tiny flags, and I remember thinking, "Please don't give me one of those." I'm just not a flag waver. Anyway, I could see that Annie and I had a lot in common. As the book continues, though, it takes a turn toward the conventional. It's still enjoyable, but it doesn't live up to the promise of the first half of the book.

• In Her Own Sweet Time, by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt: This is part-journalism, part-memoir detailing Lehmann-Haupt's quest for possible motherhood. Definitely interesting, and it gives you a lot to think about. For example, Dr. Eleonora Porcu, the Italian doctor who pioneered egg-freezing technology, doesn't feel that women should actually use it. She believes that society should change to allow women to have children young without derailing their careers. Like I said, interesting. However, like that supermom/slacker mom book I wrote about a while back, it really details a problem mostly encountered by the affluent.
• Twenties Girl, by Sophie Kinsella: It's still summer--don't judge me!