Storage hacks that suck

I live in a very small house (I hesitate to call it a tiny house because those are smaller), so I am always looking out for ideas to maximize space, usually on Pinterest. I've read the vast majority of the hacks out there, and many of them are useless due to the way my house is set up. Here's what I mean:

1. Hang organizers from your doors! I have exactly two doors in my house. One is the front door, and one is the bathroom door. I am loath to hang organizers on either. It would look weird on the front door, and I have never seen or heard of anyone putting organizers on their front door. There is a towel rack attached to the back (inside) of my bathroom door, as well as some hooks, keeping me from putting a hanging organizer there. I also think it would look weird to put it on the outward side of the door, since guests (and anyone who looks through the windows) will see it. Such is my dire need of places to store my shoes that I would consider putting an over the door organizer on my bathroom door anyway, except for the main reason: these organizers always come with thick metal square hooks to hang them from the top of the door. These are always too thick to let you close the door properly, because whoever first came up with them did so in a time in which all doors had a 1/4 inch gap all around (I'm guessing) and no one has changed the dimensions since, even though now the gaps are 1/8th of an inch or less. I live alone and don't mind having the door ajar when I use the restroom, but it's awkward when guests come over. I had an over the door organizer on my bathroom door in my last apartment, and when my private father needed to use the restroom, he forced it closed and ripped twin chunks from the door frame. I was worried I wouldn't get my deposit back, but luckily the landlord didn't look up. As you can see I don't want to go through that again. Plus a non-ugly shoe organizer/rack is hard to find unless you want to spend a lot of money, which I never do. I have two closets, but they have heavy folding doors with handle pulls right in the middle of the narrow panels. It's a nightmare. 
2. Store things under your bed! Listen, my bed is approximately two centimeters from the floor. It is a nice-enough modern bed with squat plastic feet and a padded headboard that is so short it is blocked by my pillow, since I have a box spring and a mattress and I think the manufacturers assumed everyone would just use a mattress. Use bed raisers! Pinterest yells at me. My bed's squat plastic feet? Are shaped like rectangles on their sides. All bed raisers are built for round or square bed feet, even though low-slung beds have been having a moment for some years and you'd think someone would get a lightbulb over their head and make bed raisers for rectangular feet. But no, I am doomed to have (four centimeters of) wasted space under there. I briefly thought of resting the feet (plus the hidden one in the middle) on cement blocks, but what if the legs slipped off? I don't know how to make that stable. Oh, how I wish I hadn't been seduced by the low price and padded headboard and bought a bed that was actually high enough to slide my under the bed rolling organizer under. I actually wish I had had the brains to buy a storage bed with drawers underneath and a bookcase for a headboard. That would have been ideal. 
3. Hang organizers/pot lids on the inside of your kitchen cabinet doors! Do none of you have shelves in the middle of your cabinets that go all the way to the front of the cabinet? There is just not enough space there. 
4. Store dishes and pot lids vertically, or on a stacking organizer! Use shelf risers! Again, shelves in the middle of all but my below the sink cabinets. I guess I could try taking the shelf off its supports in one of my bigger cabinets, but it sounds like a pain. 
5. Use the wasted space above your doors! My ceilings are incredibly low. I can just reach up and touch the ceiling downstairs without any effort, and I've whacked the upstairs ceiling several times when taking my shirt off over my head. I think it's 6.25 feet high, and maybe 6.5 feet high downstairs. There is no space above the doorways, let alone wasted space.
6. Any kind of modification that requires actual construction: this is a rental??? I mean I wish I could install a tiny broom closet between the studs of my house, or build under-stairs shelves that you can pull out, or hang cubbies on the wall. I'm not even supposed to be using that many pushpins for my pictures. 
7. Use an old chest or trunk as a coffee table! My "living room" area is so small I can't have any coffee table at all. I have one ottoman and it's against the foot of my lounge.
8. Use the dead space behind doors! See #1. Also, my doors don't have that kind of dead space behind them. 
9. Install shelves or rails below your kitchen cabinets! Low ceilings strike again. I have narrow counters as well. 
10. This is not an impossibility, but I kind of hate articles that suggest you get all-new furniture. What do I look like, a Vanderbilt? I have half a dozen chests of drawers from 2 different childhood bedroom sets as well as the childhood bedroom set of a cousin's cousin (hand-me-down squared!). My chaise lounge and plastic storage drawer unit were inherited from my grandma, my table and chairs from my best friend when she moved, and my garment rack from my parents or my sister. The only new furniture pieces are my bed, my bookshelves, my other plastic drawer units and my kitchen cart, all of which were scooped at low prices. Do I look like I have money to buy all-clear furniture, or furniture with hairpin legs? What I get is what I have. 

Anyway. I'll stick to trying to wring as much storage space out of my tiny weird closets as I can. Share any tips you have in the comments.

Book review: Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

Mara, Daughter of the Nile was assigned reading for my 8th grade world history class during the ancient Egypt portion. I really liked it then, and when I came across it in a thrift store, I bought it for nostalgic reasons. It's clear from the name written on the book's edges and the highlighting that another eighth grader read then discarded this book. Rather funny and full circle-y.

Requisite Amazon summary:

Mara is a proud and beautiful slave girl who yearns for freedom in ancient Egypt, under the rule of Queen Hatshepsut. Mara is not like other slaves; she can read and write, as well as speak the language of Babylonian. So, to barter for her freedom, she finds herself playing the dangerous role of double spy for two arch enemies—each of whom supports a contender for the throne of Egypt.

Against her will, Mara finds herself falling in love with one of her masters, the noble Sheftu, and she starts to believe in his plans of restoring Thutmose III to the throne. But just when Mara is ready to offer Sheftu her help and her heart, her duplicity is discovered, and a battle ensues in which both Mara’s life and the fate of Egypt are at stake.

So, pretty exciting stuff, right? 13 year old me was engrossed. Adult me enjoyed it but has some criticisms. First of all, Mara is totally a Mary Sue. She's really smart: not only can she read and write, but she also speaks fluent Babylonian. She's really clever, crafty and resourceful, dodging and out-maneuvering strong adult men and having the ability, as a 17 year old girl, to play two powerful political leaders as a double agent. Let's not forget that she can twist young men around her little finger just by flirting with them and has Sheftu falling in love with her, despite her acting bratty towards him. Oh, and she's really pretty, with blue eyes. Like seriously. Obviously 8th grade me loved this story about a clever bilingual resourceful teen girl w/ blue eyes, but as an adult I want my heroines to feel like real people. 

Mara doesn't remember her parents and has been sold to multiple owners, but she has a vague memory of someone showing her affection, and we're supposed to intuit from that that that's why she knows Babylonian. That makes no sense. If I learned a language as a (very small) child, I would not still be fluent in said language as an older teen if I hadn't had anyone speak it with me in over a decade. Maybe previous masters had Babylonian slaves who talked to her, or she made friends with Babylonians wherever she was forced to go? It's just too convenient. In the beginning of the book we see Mara steal a scroll from her (illiterate) master's library, so I guess that's how she was able to keep up her reading and writing skills. Something else that felt off to me was that Mara had gone through tons of masters and was always getting beaten for insolence and not doing her chores, and yet she still had this unbreakable spirit and was always mouthing off to her masters. ??? That's not really something that sounds accurate in a slavery-run society. It's something that I see too often. 

Mara did not feel 17 years old to me, except maybe in the way she acted towards Sheftu. The stuff she had to handle (being a translator for a homesick Babylonian princess and passing messages to the Prince of Egypt, handling two masters as a double agent, etc.) would simply not be possible for any teenage girl. A grown woman in M15, sure. I also didn't like Sheftu's behavior towards Mara. That whole "I don't know whether to kiss or spank you" crap is the worst thing about romance novels, and it's infantilizing for him to always call Mara "little one". And then they fall in love???? Honestly. 

I did like Mara's growing friendship with the Babylonian princess, who was Mara's opposite and so homesick for Canaan. It's clear that Ms. Jarvis McGraw did her research on ancient Egypt and the different cultures that would have interacted. The settings and scene building etc. were very vivid and felt real.

Anyway, I did enjoy this book as it has plenty of suspense and intrigue, even if it's not that believable character-wise. I'd say go ahead and read this book if you like 20th century historical romance novels with a mystery or bit of suspense. 

Cover notes: This cover is okay. It's very romantic and I can't speak to the historical accuracy of her clothing and the view, etc. There have only been a few other covers of MDotN, and they aren't much better. 

Score: 3.9 out of 5 stars
Read in: early July
From: the thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away

Book review: The Passion by Jeanette Winterson

The only book I read in June was The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. I picked it up because it sounded interesting. It's set during the Napoleonic wars, aka Regency times, and part of the book takes place in Venice, which I love and have been to. It also sounded kind of mysterious and magical. Here is the summary, from both the back of this book and Amazon:

Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice’s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meet their singular destiny.

Right off the bat, I can tell you that I don't like this summary. Whoever wrote it did not read the book that thoroughly. The most glaring example is that the summary says that Villanelle's husband gambled away her heart. This is not true: he gambled away her body. Because he lost at cards, the husband had to give Villanelle to his opponent to work as a "comfort woman" to Napoleon's troops. That is how she and Henri meet. Also, I don't think it's right to give away that Villanelle has webbed feet in the summary, when the book itself is very secretive about it. It gives away the surprise reveal in the last part of the book. The summary makes it sound like Henri and Villanelle meet by chance in Venice. They actually meet in Russia when both decide to run away from the doomed military enterprise (Russia in winter? Does no one ever think?), and Villanelle takes Henri to Venice to hide from Napoleon's men.

As you will have guessed, this book does not shy away from the ugliness of life or war. There was a lot of horrible stuff mentioned, and while I will not list it all, I would apply trigger warnings for explicit sexual scenarios (including non-consensual), forced prostitution, a mention of gang rape, murder, blood, gore, violence, mentions of abandoned feral children, starvation, animal death, and that's all I can think of right now. 

While I liked Henri and Villanelle individually, I don't think I really liked them together as a couple. Villanelle can do so much better than Henri, and she doesn't even feel that way towards him. I am tired of reading/seeing couple pairings that happen just because the guy is in love with the girl. I was also displeased at the ending. After all that suffering and misery, there is no happy ending for the two of them. Villanelle refuses to marry Henri (despite having a child with him) and he goes mad in an insane asylum. Like what? Why? 

However, this was really good and rather beautifully written. If you can stomach all of the ugliness listed above and like the historical setting and topics, I would recommend this book. I liked the Venice setting and events and magical fantasy stuff, such as Villanelle literally losing her heart to a married woman and Henri having to find it before Villanelle is held in thrall. The summary writer probably got this part of the book confused with Villanelle's husband's gambling problem. I also love Villanelle's name; it is a poetic form I learned about in college. (Parents, do not get any ideas.)

The above cover is the one my copy has, and it's ok. Obviously the cards are due to Villanelle's job before she's gambled away, and the mask is because it takes place in Venice. I don't think I've ever seen a book with the author's picture on the front (apart from important literary people like C.S. Lewis). I didn't realize this when I bought the book, but Jeanette Winterson is an important lesbian/LGBT+  writer. I'm not a huge fan of the cover art, but all the other covers were just as bad if not worse. A lot of them featured chickens since Henri works plucking and preparing chickens for Napoleon and apparently the artists only read up to that point in the book.


Score: 4 out of 5 stars
Read in: early June
From: the thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: idk I might give it away at some point

Book review: Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

I decided to reread Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw after I saw that one of my friends was reading it on Instagram, and she has the same copy as me. This is a play, which was so successful that it was turned into a musical and then one of the favorite movies of my childhood, starring Audrey Hepburn. The play is called Pygmalion instead of My Fair Lady because it references the ancient Greek myth, about a sculptor named Pygmalion who carved a statue of his dream woman, which was brought to life by Aphrodite because she was moved he fell in love with the statue? IDK. Obligatory Amazon summary, because I am lazy:

Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence. 

The play is very much like My Fair Lady, except that there are no songs and Eliza marries Freddy at the end and they run a struggling flower shop. Freddy's family and Henry Higgins' mother play a greater role: a sort of parlor party? at Mrs. Higgins' house is where Eliza first tries out her high-class lady act and ends up just saying colorful/shocking language in a posh accent. In the movie, they go to Ascot so Audrey Hepburn can wear an (admittedly iconic) enormous hat and a tight dress. Also, the big to-do where Eliza has to prove her Lady-ness to Professor Higgins' former student is a garden party in the play and a ball in the movie. In the rambling epilogue, we also learn about Freddy's sister and how she learns socialism or something. I didn't really care.

I found the play very quick, despite its various ramblings about class (understandable) and H.G. Wells for some reason. Obviously besides the makeover aspect, my favorite thing about this play is the linguistics. I think My Fair Lady set me up to love linguistics, which I have found fascinating ever since I took a linguistics class in college. I will say that Henry Higgins is very classist and does not recognize that all British English dialects are valid and there is no right one that is 'correct'. This is a good book for English and linguistics students to read in order to see the racist attitudes behind diction classes and linguistic imperialism, etc. Despite all this, I did kind of find Eliza's Cockney rather hard to read, as it's written down phonetically. If you hate dialects in books, I would skip this.

At some point Henry Higgins calls himself and the Colonel "a couple of confirmed bachelors" and that makes the play make more sense. Of course two gay guys would give a girl a makeover and judge everything about her harshly and just kind of... not super care about her future. I feel like most straight men of that era would have been like, "well, if you can't figure out what to do with your life I'll have to marry you since I'm responsible for you." There's a whole song in My Fair Lady where Henry Higgins basically says he'd rather slit his throat than get married to a woman. That's gay proof for you.

I like this play but have decided to give it away since I just have way too many books and some of them have got to go. I would recommend this book if you like My Fair Lady or linguistics or late 19th/early 20th century English class dynamics, etc.

This has nothing to do with the book, but in My Fair Lady Freddy is played by an absolute dreamboat who I have just learned last night was actually young Jeremy Brett, the most iconic Sherlock Holmes!!!!! I was SHOOK.

The above image is the cover that my copy has, and it shows Eliza as a flower girl in the beginning of the book. It's ok. I think maybe the small woman floating above the title is Eliza as a Lady maybe? idk. The only bad Pygmalion covers are the ones who depict her as a flapper or some other anachronism, or who use a Klimt painting as the cover.

Score: 3.9 out of 5 stars
Read in: end of May
From: the thrift store
Format: paperback
Status: giving away

Book review: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

I picked up The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro because some blogger I read said it was good. It won the Man Booker Prize in 1989, and Mr. Ishiguro, who is Japanese-English, has won the Nobel Prize in literature. I thought it sounded interesting, and thought I'd give it a try. Here is the Amazon summary:

...Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.

TRotD is very well written, and it's clear Mr. Ishiguro is a master of his craft. I thought the prose quite dense, however. Unless you've read a ton of 19th and 20th century British literature and/or are very familiar with the Downton Abbey or Jeeves and Wooster miniseries, a lot of this book will be hard to read and not make a lot of sense to you. You really need to have that early modern English class-obsessed culture and servitude knowledge.

[SPOILERS, I guess] One sub?plot of the book not touched upon in the Amazon blurb is Stevens' relationship with Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. The butler and housekeeper were the heads of the service staff, and as such generally had a closer working and possibly friendly relationship. While Stevens is the narrator and we see everything through his uptight and uber-professional viewpoint, it's clear that Miss Kenton has a crush on Stevens, what with bringing him flowers "to cheer up his room" and arguing with him in a flouncy Austen-heroine manner. Nothing happens between them as Stevens is so emotionally constipated because he thinks that's what a butler should be like, to the extent that he's too afraid of neglecting his duties to properly say goodbye to his dying father. Miss Kenton got engaged in an attempt to awaken jealousy in Stevens, and when it didn't work, she married the dude anyway even though she didn't love him. Stevens and Mrs. Benn meet up many years later and reminisce about the past. Stevens made the trip in hopes that she'll leave her husband (since she sounded unhappy in her letters to him) and they can work together again at Darlington Hall. However, this doesn't happen, making disappointment one of the major themes of the book (besides emotional constipation and love of class separateness). In one of the saddest lines of the book, Stevens says that he gave so much of himself to Lord Darlington that he doesn't think he has anything more to give to his current employer, a rich American Anglophile. [end spoilers]

Plot-wise, most of the action is emotional and philosophical. Nothing much really happens, so this book is recommended only for people who care more about feelings and history than action. This book was really sad but worth reading, probably. If it sounds like you'll be into it, give it a try.

The cover art above is really for the movie, which starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. My copy had the same cover as a movie tie-in. Most of the covers for TRotD seem to have clocks, sundials, and hourglasses, due to the theme of time lost/gone by. A lot of covers have old fancy cars and show parts of headless butlers standing at attention.

Score: 3.9 out of 5 stars
Read in: mid May
From: the library booksale
Format: paperback
Status: giving away

random: Michelle's Very Productive Sunday

I don't feel like writing a book review, but I wanted to talk about my day yesterday. I often have low energy due to a medical condition, so it's not unusual to be loved by anyone to spend an entire weekend just sitting on my couch watching Amazon Prime videos since I don't have the energy to run errands or clean. However, yesterday was a high energy day, and I was able to accomplish several things:

1. I washed all the dishes in the sink! Well, there's still a few things, but they're of the "this just needs a cursory wash" variety. I've been known to leave dirty dishes filled with water until interesting mold colonies grow in them. I don't believe in drying dishes by hand, so I put them in the dish rack to drip/air dry.
2. I filled my morning pillbox. This is not a big task but I've been known to neglect it. 
3. I organized and rearranged my bathroom counter! I had been procrastinating on crocheting a suitable hemp cord to hang a card catalog drawer on my wall in order to store some of my hair products. I had bought the drawer (it's not really a drawer for a card catalog since there are oval holes bored into each side and no iconic drawer pull/placard situation, but it is related to card catalogs in some way) at my school's library book sale...in Spring 2017. Yes, a year ago. On Friday I finished crocheting and braiding the hemp cord, then strung it through the drawer's holes and hung it from the Command hooks I'd stuck to the bathroom wall shortly after I bought the drawer last year. Then on Sunday, I removed almost everything from my bathroom counter, which you almost couldn't see through the mess, then put everything back in an orderly way. My hair products didn't end up fitting in the drawer due to the hemp cord having to go exactly through the middle to keep the drawer from tipping, so I filled it with smaller thinner things like my glasses cases and sample skin/hair care packets. I put most of my hair products in the shower organizer hung on the opposite wall. I had purchased a fancy oval engraved metal tray from Dollar Tree (it looks SO much more expensive than it is) to organize my bathroom counter in a pretty way, and I put my face products and most-used hair products in it. I also put things in drawers and wherever they are supposed to go, instead of letting them sit on my bathroom counter. I'm very pleased with how everything turned out!
4. I put away the folded clean clothes I had left sitting in my clothes hamper for weeks. Whenever my hamper is full, I take it to my parents' house to use their washer and dryer, then put the clean clothes in the hamper to bring them back to my place. When I leave the clothes there instead of putting them away, though, I don't have anywhere to put my dirty laundry and I end up heaping it on the ground where the hamper usually goes. My hamper is filled with dirty clothes now, so it looks like I'm going to have to repeat the process this weekend...
5. I sorted and put away many of the clothes that were lying on my bedroom floor. I still have to put away some pants and skirts, and figure out what to do with some sweater dresses that I can't really hang, but my floor is way cleaner than it was before. There are still clothes strewn on the floor of my other room, but baby steps...
6. I forgot to say that I made my bed before step #4 and 5, as I use it as a surface to sort my clothes before putting them away. 
7. I rearranged several furniture items in my bedroom. A few days ago I had decided that the location of one of my chests of drawers didn't work for me. I had placed it against the wall facing the window with a mirror on top so I could use it as a vanity and display my prettier makeup products, but my blinds let a lot of light out, and the mirror reflected it, doubling the amount of light keeping me awake at night (I prefer a pitch black room at night and have trouble sleeping when there's too much light). I moved my vanity (a different furniture piece which was below the window) over a few inches, removed everything from the top of the chest of drawers, cleared the path of any obstacles, then dragged the chest of drawers over to be next to the vanity. I then re-placed my vanity items on the chest (along with a lipstick organizer and acrylic makeup drawers organizer that had no home). It looks a bit packed there, as there are some other chests of drawers against the wall perpendicular to the vanity chest of drawers and my vanity, but I checked and all of them have drawer clearance. I had thought of dragging it back to the other room where it used to be, but I want to have as many of my clothes drawers together as possible. 
8. I moved all obstacles and rolled my hanging clothes rack over to where the chest of drawers used to be. It was previously against the middle wall in the other room, which is not load-bearing (and my bed is already against that wall, gritting teeth emoji), and I decided it made more sense to have it be by my closets (I have two tiny closets since my ceiling slopes down A-frame-style). Besides, the wall by my closets is load-bearing. I also went ahead and rearranged the clothes on the rack to be in a certain color order. There is enough room by the clothes rack to...
9. hang my Mexico shadowbox and put up command hooks to hang my Mexican purses. I did the Command picture hanging strip process for the shadowbox and stuck on the Command hooks for two of my purses (I have to wait until I can hang up the shadowbox in order to see where to hang the other purses). 
10. I also hung up a small mirror I'd bought from the cheap front section of Target (it has hearts all over it like my bedspread), a $1 wooden wall decor item that matches my other wall decor, another wall hanging decor item from Target's cheap section, and did the Command picture hanging strip process for a framed poster I hadn't put up (my VW Bug poster I've had since grade school. It doesn't match my room theme but I can't let it go). I also hung up my wooden Wonder Woman comic book cover art plaque thing over the vanity chest of drawers. I can't put the big mirror there since my ceiling slopes down.
11. I also rearranged the items on my other two chests of drawers, the ones I didn't move. I had several makeup organizing items on the floor, and after I moved the vanity chest of drawers to where it is now, I moved them to be on top of my left chest of drawers, moving the other items that had previously been there to the right chest of drawers. I now have almost all of my makeup organizers on that chest: 4 liquid lipsticks/lipglosses organizers, one compact organizer, 6 mini tin buckets/cups holding more lipglosses, and my big magnetic whiteboard that holds all of my Colourpop Super Shock Shadows (I glued/stuck magnets to the backs of them). My small magnetic whiteboard is on the right chest of drawers because I have a small mirror hanging on the wall next to the big whiteboard and I don't want to cover it up. I put more sticky magnets on the backs of some of my single eyeshadow compacts (and 2 small eyeshadow duos) and put them on the small whiteboard.
12. I filled my evening pillbox as well, another small talk I often neglect.

That is quite a lot! I know there's 11 bullet points but each one lists several smaller tasks. I still have tons of cleaning and organizing to do, but I feel like I've done so much. I'm pretty proud of myself for being able to do all that in one day, after getting up at noon!

Book review: Palimpsest by Gore Vidal

I was not planning on buying Palimpsest from the library booksale, but once I started reading it I had to. It is Gore Vidal's memoir about his life, based more on his memories as they come than on historical facts. Gore, who died a few years ago, came from a political dynasty family (Al Gore is a distant cousin; Gore Vidal dropped his first name to go by his mother's and father's surnames as a teenager) and was related by marriage to the Kennedys. He was also friends with fellow gay writer Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, and countless other literary, political, and Hollywood luminaries. His life story isn't really told chronologically, as he shares memories as they come to him, like when you're talking to someone and they backtrack. Far from sounding absentminded, Gore Vidal's voice is steady, sure of himself, sometimes serious and sometimes delightfully bitchy. I read this expecting to read lots of zingers and shade, and I was not disappointed.
A palimpsest is "a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain", according to the dictionary. It's a term I came across in library school, and that's what attracted me to this book. At turns funny, sad, and explicit, I'd recommend it if you like old Hollywood and literary gossip or have read every other Kennedy book out there and want something from another perspective. I enjoyed it but won't be keeping this one.

Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Read in: mid April-late May
From: the library booksale
Format: paperback
Status: giving away