Is Everyone Hanging out without Me?, and Other Concerns, Mindy Kaling

This is such a good title for a book like this. Which is to say, a collection of short essays about Mindy Kaling’s life and thoughts she has thought on various topics. Mindy Kaling is a charming human person and I think she would be a fun friend. Her book is charming and fun, and slight. She says some charming things about gender performance (but she doesn’t call it gender performance) and TV and girlfriends. But they are kind of more — can I say this without appearing to hate on blogs, my love for which is well-documented? — more like blog posts than essays. They would be very good blog posts. As essays they aren’t quite together enough for me.

The Unquiet, Jeannine Garsee

I’m the worst but this is the “bipolar girl in supernatural situation” book that I read because I couldn’t get Bleeding Violet. I know! I’m a jerk! I didn’t expect it to be bad, I just expected it to be less awesome than the imagined awesomeness I ascribe to Bleeding Violet, which I have still not read (grrr). The Unquiet is about a bipolar girl who comes to live in a small town with a haunted school. The haunting is scary; the bipolar girl doesn’t want everyone to think she’s crazy; eventually enough horrible haunty stuff happens that she decides to do something about it. And there’s a boy who doesn’t mind her being bipolar. Hooray.

And it was fine. I expect more from Bleeding Violet, but this was fine. There’s some stuff about being mentally ill, and some stuff about fitting in with the high school crowd. The supernatural system wasn’t very well-defined, and the ghost’s motivations were all a bit weird. Rinn’s relationship with her stepfather is kind of heartbreaking, but most of the other emotional stuff failed to land.

In other unsurprising news, I should review books right after I finish reading them. I usually have stuff to say right after, but then it falls out of my head at an alarming rate. Sorry, Mindy Kaling. Sorry, The Unquiet.

Oh gosh, even with combining these two into one post, I didn’t have much to say about them. Let’s take this opportunity, then, for everyone to tell me what you thought of the ending of Looper. Everyone’s seen it by now, right? If not don’t take to the comments, because that’s where I will be expressing my severe disappointment with the ending. I was severely disappointed with the ending. I liked the movie all the way through — the scene with Seth Dano’s future self running away is one of the coolest, creepiest things ever — but then they let me down with the ending. I haven’t seen Brick, but I do remember being unimpressed with the ending of The Brothers Bloom; is it possible that Rian Johnson just isn’t a closer? Good at the set-up, not so good at the payoff?

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