Bushwick Picks: Molly Wizenberg Edition
Tonight is the night! The Bushwick Book Club Seattle Presents:A Homemade Life is only moments away, but before the show begins we thought we would check in with the author, Molly Wizenberg. (We’re so excited to have her at the show tonight!) She shared with us the books and music she currently has on her list.
“I am the world’s slowest reader, and I only make it through a handful of full-length books a year. But a few months ago, some of us ladies at Delancey started a book club, and it’s been a great way to force myself to speed up a bit. (I can get really bogged down in details, analyzing a writer’s language and style. No fun for anybody.) A couple of months ago, we decided to tackle Madame Bovary. I was glad to finally check it off my list, though it made me feel like throwing myself out of a window. But this past month, man oh man, we read a great one: The Fault in Our Stars, by YA author John Green. It was so good that I haven’t been able to start another book since I finished it. I’m not ready to move on. I had read Green’s earlier novel Looking for Alaska a number of years ago, and I liked it, but TFIOS really knocked me out. The characters felt so true, so fully realized, so clever and smart and lovable. They felt like characters in one of those ’80s high school movies starring Molly Ringwald. I had been warned that TFIOS would make me cry, but I doubted that it really would (up until this point, only one book had ever made me cry: Plays Well With Others, by Allan Gurganus), but I wound up crying semi-hysterically for a good half hour or so at the end. My daughter’s babysitter arrived while I was still mopping up my face, and I scared the crap out of her as I clutched the book and weepily tried to explain myself. Anyway, all of this to say that I am now a giant John Green fan. Me, and about a million teenage girls.
I should add that I also read the New Yorker. In general, I tend to gravitate more toward nonfiction than fiction, and The New Yorker is my favorite place to read nonfiction.
And as for listening, well, to be perfectly honest, lately I’ve been revisiting stuff from the early- to mid-90s, like Hole’s Live Through This and all the Fugazi albums I used to listen to in high school. I remember being at a Fugazi show when I was 21 and thinking, I hope I’m never too old to like this, and it makes me very happy to see that I still do, 14 years later. I also dug out Sleater-Kinney’s One Beat the other day – I can’t believe it’s already 12 years old – and Ted Leo’s Shake The Sheets. Ted Leo’s songs are so catchy, and he seems to just keep churning them out. Very inspiring.”
– Molly Wizenberg
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