Friday, May 2, 2014

Book Club Friday: The Nerdy, the Quirky, and the Downright Bizarre

More than a month after my honeymoon, I'm finally recapping the last few books I read. In contrast to my other honeymoon reads, these books are all e-books. So instead of reading them at the beach or by the pool, I read these at the airport and on the plane.

And as usual, these were all priced at $3.99 or less when I bought them!

     


Collections of short stories helped me get through undergrad, when I still desperately needed fiction, but when my time was dominated by textbooks and French literature. I could read just one or two short stories and get my "fix" for a few days.


But even though I have more time to read now, I still enjoy collections of short stories. It's a great way to discover new writers.
 
The Last Girlfriend on Earth 
and Other Love Stories

From Amazon: In "Center of the Universe," God struggles to balance the demands of his career with the needs of his long-term girlfriend. In "Magical Mr. Goat," a young girl's imaginary friend yearns to become "more than friends." In "Unprotected," an unused prophylactic recalls his years spent trapped inside a teen boy's wallet. The stories in Simon Rich's new book are bizarre, funny, and yet...relatable. Rich explores love's many complications-losing it, finding it, breaking it, and making it-and turns the ordinary into the absurd. With razor-sharp humor and illustrations, and just in time for Valentine's Day, Rich takes readers for an exhilarating, hilarious ride on the rollercoaster of love.

This collection of sci-fi love stories is hilarious. Like there's one story where women trade their boyfriends like sports teams trade their players. The title story is takes place in an alternate universe with only one woman left alive after some epidemic. The story about the goat, listed enough, brilliantly mocks Nice Guys. Basically, if you like wit and biting social commentary wrapped up in sci-fi and romance, then you should read The Last Girlfriend on Earth and Other Love Stories.  

We Had Stars Once

From Amazon: Join a girl discovering her true, supernatural origins. Follow a famous babysitter into space.  Journey through dystopia with a man who has lost everything, and experience the exhilaration of finally making it home. Aliens, cocky knights, and superheroes do battle with inner darkness and things that go bump in the night. From the writers of Thursday Tales comes an imaginative anthology of darkness, adventure, betrayal and mystery. From sixteen minds come sixteen tales of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. A world of worlds awaits.

On Twitter, I know that I casually mention GroupThink occasionally. It's the group blog/forum associated with the website Jezebel. Each of the Gawker Media sites has its own group blog/forum, and one of the groups self-published a collection of short stories submitted by members! Each story is very different, and some were so good, I wanted them to be expanded into a novel.

The Rosie Project

From Amazon: MEET DON TILLMAN, a brilliant yet socially challenged professor of genetics, who’s decided it’s time he found a wife. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers.

Rosie Jarman is all these things. She also is strangely beguiling, fiery, and intelligent. And while Don quickly disqualifies her as a candidate for the Wife Project, as a DNA expert Don is particularly suited to help Rosie on her own quest: identifying her biological father. When an unlikely relationship develops as they collaborate on the Father Project, Don is forced to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that, despite your best scientific efforts, you don’t find love, it finds you.


Okay, so this is not a collection of short stories, but it's still nerdy and quirky, if not science fiction. The Rosie Project was AMAZING. It's narrated by Don, a professor who has Asperger's, but is completely clueless about this. There are several hints that his friends are trying to enlighten him, but he never connects the dots. He likes order in his life, but Rosie disrupts all of that... in a good way. It's really adorable how he awkwardly and cluelessly tries to figure things out between him and Rosie. 

All of these books are quick reads, and I highly recommend them!

Linking up with Book Club Friday!


*Those pictures? Amazon Affiliate links.

1 comment:

  1. that short story collection sounds awesome! I'm going to check it out - thank you :)

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