the glass castle

I found The Glass Castle absolutely gripping. I could not stop thinking about her peripatic, deprived childhood. She and her siblings suffered so much due to her parents - the classic alcoholic father and irresponsible mother, too busy creating art to fix a meal for her children. Instead of getting a job and putting food on the table, the parents chose to let their kids go hungry and dirty. It was an "adventure" - really strange. The revelation at the end - that her mother had access to money all along - really shocked me! I was appalled and stunned. It made me think that the mother had to be severely mentally ill - delusional, narcissitic and possibly bipolar. A great book.


Admission is a book about an admissions counselor for Princeton. The narrative is quite slow and unengaging but the reflections upon the college admission process are insightful. Whose needs are served by this process? What does it mean to ask teenagers to present themselves as perfectly competent in all areas? Why does so much life-changing power belong in the hands of admissions officers? A lot of the most interesting parts of teh book are presented in almost Socratic dialogues, where certain characters challenge the narrator and we get to hear all the explanations and rationalizations.

I liked when the narrator said something like - admission to a great college is one of the very few portals to a different life. How true - and it rang especally true after reading The Glass Castle, where the deprived young girl got into Barnard, escaping a horrible life and starting on a career.



A fun book with an unusual narrator, a British teenager boy with autism. The book does a great job at depicting how the world looks to him - every detail demands his attention until he is overwhelmed. I giggled when he brought his pet rat to the tube station, alarming the other passengers. It also gives glimpses of how hard it is for his parents to care for him. They are complex, doing bad things and showing their goodness at the same time. The book also has puzzles in it.

Also... I read "Who Killed Iago?" - a literary trivia quiz book. It's HARD! And "How to Photograph Your Baby" - kind of elementary but inspiring. I also read "The Scenic Route" - instead of a strong driving narrative, it's a collection of stories. It has many priceless observations but I didn't love it madly. It requires a lot of attention to read and I was reading it while the baby was crawling around the room. I'll have to return to it someday.