currently reading

I just finished Jeffrey Zaslow's The Girls From Ames: A Story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship. Now, why--you might ask--would I be reading such a thing? Well, first of all, because it's a pretty decent/interesting book. But, secondly, a friend of mine is actually one of the main characters.

Which is really, really weird. But I'll get to that.





















Although the title is pretty self-explanatory, the story is about 11 girls (Jenny, Kelly, Sally, Cathy, Karen, Karla, Marilyn, Diana, Jane, Angela and Sheila) who grew up together in Ames, Iowa and how they have managed to maintain their intense friendships with each other over the past 40 years. If you'll pardon some crass definitions, it all sounds very "Oprah" or "Lifetime" when I say it out loud and, frankly, that's because it is--if you're that cynical about it. Overall, it's just a story that can be incredibly moving at times. It's not my normal cup of tea but there are some things that transcend genre in this book that are exceptionally powerful:

• Karla's daughter, Christie, has a battle with cancer that I'm not ashamed to say made me a little teary-eyed while I read it.


• Kelly says some extremely candid things about her battle with breast cancer. In particular, what she says about how it changed her body image showed me an aspect of that disease I had never thought of.


• The death--at a young age--of one in the group (I won't say who) really colored their adult perceptions of how they've lived their lives. It introduced mortality to the Ames girls a lot earlier than "the norm" and this obviously had an effect.

Zaslow is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and is co-author of The Last Lecture but this book is solely his and the reportage is thorough in the pictures it paints. Here's a decent review from The Dallas Morning News that could shed some light on it all if you're interested. And, if that weren't enough, the publisher has set up an interactive website at girlsfromames.com for people to share their own stories. Definitely cool!

The strange thing about reading this book was that one of the Ames girls is a friend of mine that I've known for going on 10 years now. Every time she popped into the narrative it made the reading a much more immediate and intimate experience that I'll probably have to wait a while before I stumble upon again. But, aside from that, it's a great book to page your way through.

Next it's on to Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity. Aside from the kickass title, it's one of those books that has absolutely no description of itself anywhere on the jacket because, as I'm gradually finding out, it's really tough to determine what it's actually about. It's great--don't get me wrong, here--but I'm almost 20 pages in at the moment and I have no idea what I'm in store for. In fact, it kind of reminds me of the sensation of reading something by Hunter S. Thompson or Jack Kerouac; the journey being more important than the destination and whatnot.