I Don't Care About Your Band

"Girrrrrrl." - My brain, to Julie Klausner, while reading her horrifying tales of dating hipster douchebags and hateful depressives of every variety and flavor. It's like watching a slasher movie, except instead of yelling "Don't open that door!" you're yelling...okay well you're yelling "Don't open that door!" but the guy behind it just treats you like shit instead of murdering you. Which is SCARIER? You decide!

Actually my favorite part of this book is when she talks about how your twenties are the worst years of your life that at the time you think are great. God, hindsight's a bitch. I don't care about your band! Or your stupid accounting internship! That felt good, let the healing process begin.

3.5 late-night booty calls out of 5.

The Devil All the Time

This book is...what's the opposite of chick lit? And don't say MAN lit, if "man lit" is a thing it's a genre only comprised of those Uncle John Bathroom Reader books and the memoirs of Tim Allen. I just mean that I would pay good money to see one of the ditzy (yet lovable) stiletto-clad heroines whose first world problems dominate those pastel-covered books enter the dark and grimy world Pollock created. Hi-larious hi-jinks would surely ensue!

Deadly road trips, a blood-soaked prayer log, a predatory holy man, a crooked sheriff - no one in this book is a good person, everyone does horrible things, and you'll be left squirming like a preacher getting insects poured over his head (oh yeah, that happens too. I had to put the book in the freezer, Joey style, after that one).

4 sweaty, dirty men's undershirts out of 5. Ugh. Disgusting.

Zone One

Oh this book is great. Zombie novel-y enough to keep a buffoon like me entertained, but smart enough to make me feel smug reading it on the subway. In other words, this book is like:

• Donuts accompanied by 18 year old Glenfiddich
• Watching an amusing and, yet, incredibly moving and poignant Pixar movie. So, all of them, except Cars & Cars 2 (the headlights should be the eyes! The headlights!)
• Spending all afternoon reading Star magazines at the nail salon while getting a super classy French manicure
• Taking B.S. college classes like Pop Culture Studies where the homework is watching The Simpsons.

Read this book and fall in love with the Zombie novel again! I bet that quote makes the back cover of the paperback edition, mark my words.

4 out of 5 metaphors showing us that WE ARE THE ZOMBIES omg my liiiiiiiiife!

Dead Until Dark & Living Dead in Dallas

Sooooookay. Suh-kay. Suh-kaaaay. And Beeeel. Biiiilllll. Beee-luh? Lesson learned: it's hard to write in a Southern accent. So if you get annoyed watching True Blood and hearing Sookie & Bill dramatically call for each other, you might do better with the Charlaine Harris books the show is based on. However, although, take into account, the flip-side: there aren't enough adjectives in the English language to properly convey the glory of Alexander Skarsgard's giant, Swedish, and often nude form. So what will it be: brain candy books sans scenery-chewing or brain-candy HDTV with all its perks? I guess you can have both; you were never going to read War & Peace anyway.

3.5 Viking butts out of 5.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

The cover says it all - pink but not cloying, an awkward facial expression, and a title expressing FOMO. This taps into the slightly nerdy, slightly superficial, completely anxious 20-something female experience like nothing else!

Mindy Kaling got her big break by writing and performing in a play based on the idea that Matt Damon & Ben Affleck were trying to adapt The Catcher in the Rye into a movie when the screenplay for Good Will Hunting fell out of the sky into their laps. What's not to love? I have seen the play and it's great, and not unlike reading this book: full of pop culture references, short enough to not get bored with, and perfect to drop into casual conversations to seem smart but not pretentious.

The fact is that by reading this I learned that taking prenatal vitamins will make my hair thick and lustrous, and that's worth the price of a hardcover right there.

4 fad dieting books with titles like "Fat Brain, Fat Body: How Thinking is Sabotaging Your Skinny Soul" out of 5.

An Analysis of the Books I Read in 2011 aka Nerd Alert IV

Books read: 55

• Average # of books read/month: 4.6
• Non-fiction: 16 (29%)
• Fiction: 39 (71%)
• YA Fiction: 4 (7%)
• Books by male authors: 34 (61%)
• Books by female authors: 21 (39%)
• Disliked:14 (25%)
• Ambivalent about/sort of liked:9 (17%)
• Actively enjoyed: 32 (58%)

By Genre:

• Sci-Fi/Fantasy: 8
• Biography/Memoir: 7
• Science/Medical: 3.5 (I’m only counting the UFO book as half of a science book. There, are you happy skeptics???)
• Mystery/Thriller: 4
• Graphic novels: 0
• Spiritual: 1
• Poetry: 0 (This is bad/It makes me sad)
• Historical Fiction: 1
• Short story collections/Anthologies: 2
• Contemporary fiction: 5
• Books about food: 2
• History: 3
• Horror: 14
• Classics: 0 (Haha take THAT Literature!)
• Romance: 0

Compared to 2010:

• I read 23 fewer! Unbelievable. I blame society, and the presence of so many excellent scripted shows on television. Also I should probably stop re-reading huge, 1000+ page Stephen King books that I have already read. Especially when he’s still writing NEW 1000+ page books I have yet to read!/Give other authors a chance, Jane! (Ok my first book of 2012 was 11/22/63, but after that’s done I will branch out, I promise).
• I liked most of the books I read this year, a 20% increase over last year! If I was a company and those were my financial results, my shareholders would be rich! Which is to say, can I somehow make money from this book picking ability?
• I was all about revealing/trashy celebrity biographies this year - Oh-ooh-oh-ah-oh-prah's taking the cake, of course. Celebrities whose biographies I will seek out in 2012: Coco (does she have one? SHE MUST), Mindy Kaling, Darrell Hammond, Diane Keaton, Lucille Ball.

Notes & Superlatives

• Repeated authors: Stephen King (2 years running! I'm sure this means more to him than all his other accomplishments), and George R.R. Martin (ironic considering he finishes a book every 10 years). Wow this list is really earning it's nerd alert title.
• Authors I discovered this year: I'll definitely be picking up some other books by William Gay, Yannick Murphy, Ben Winters, and Jonathan Carroll.
• Favorite book of 2011 (fiction): The Call by Yannick Murphy. In a year filled with genre fiction this subtle epistolary story set on a farm surprised me with how much I enjoyed it and how much I kept thinking about it after the fact. I also really liked A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I guess the Pulitzer Prize *does* mean something.
• Favorite book of 2011 (non-fiction): Bossypants! The only book I read last year to get 5 stars. Tina Fey you glorious monster, please never stop shining your light on our sad little world. I also really enjoyed Keith Richard's autobiography, if only for the pictures inside of a young, hot Keith, taken before his face turned into an old leather baseball mitt.
• Least Favorite book of 2011: Mini-Shopaholic. Maybe it was the recession but somehow I couldn't enjoy or relate to a book about an irresponsible twerp and her whiny brat shopping and having HIGH-larious misunderstandings and hi-jinks. OR Mockingjay, the third book in the Hunger Games series. This book should have never been written. If you do want to read the series (overall I give it a rating somewhere between a slightly interested raised eyebrow and a grunted "meh") stop after the second book. I beg of you!
• Funniest book of 2011: Bossypants. Even the cover with the disturbing man arms makes me laugh uncomfortably!
• Saddest book of 2011: The Long Goodbye, by Meghan O'Rourke. It's a memoir about her mother dying. I CAN'T. I love you mom!
• Scariest book of 2011: Bedbugs, by Ben Winters. I'm still feeling itchy and thinking every stray lint ball is the scouting party of a giant army of bloodthirsty insects.
• Things the books I read made me want to do this year: Go to Papua New Guinea, try umeboshi plums, check my mattress for bedbugs (see above), call my mom, be nicer to retail employees, add more sea vegetables to my diet, watch 80s movies, write more, and read more. Read everything!

What's your first book of 2012? Authors currently hanging out on my bedside table include Glen Duncan, Dorianne Laux, S.J. Watson, Mindy Kaling, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and Louis de Bernières. It's going to be a good year....!

In sum: I love books. You should too. I now have a Nintendo Wii but I'll try not to let Mariokart eat into my reading time. YAY LIFE!

Stories I Only Tell My Friends

This man is not aging! Lowe, what is your secret? You did not reveal it in your autobiography, that's for sure. You did; however, include many stories that followed the celebrity conceal and reveal pattern: "and that boy grew up to be...Robert Downey Jr./Sarah Jessica Parker/Bill Clinton/Justin Bieber/Lady Gaga."

He kind of skimmed over the whole underage video sex thing but I'm sure we'll learn more about that when Kitty Kelley tackles The Brat Pack (Dear Lord, please make that book happen. Thanks, Jane). He did finally explain why he named his son Johnowen: he wanted John, his wife wanted Owen - by gum it's so simple!

Rob Lowe, I enjoyed your book. I look forward to your follow-up, which will surely detail your time on Parks & Recreation (is Adam Scott amazing? Of course he is, why am I even questioning it) and finally reveal what gives you that eternal youthful glow. It's stem cells, isn't it? I bet it's stem cells.

3.5 wild nights at Hard Rock Cafe with Emilio out of 5.