March Challenge (Drop Everything and Read)

March Challenge AKA HandlewithKaro's bookclub.

So my breakfast challenge last month was a success. Sure, I had one week that was a total fail, but it got me on the right track and now I'm eating breakfast at home out of habit.

This month, my goal is to read one book a week.  I've barely cracked a book since baby girl came to town, and I no longer want to use having a baby as an excuse for letting my brain turn to mush. I'm planning to read memoirs and other easy breezy books, because I'm not quite ready to read Tolstoy or Joyce just yet.

Last week I read Susana Sonnenberg's, memoir about friendships, She Matters. The short synopsis is: this book is like High Fidelity only it's about friendships between women, it is darker and it doesn't really have coherent start to finish.   Susan Chira wrote a wonderful review of the book in the New York Times (LINK). The longer synopsis is after the jump.


And here is the longer synopsis.

Susana Sonnenberg explores some of her most significant friendships in her book She Matters.  These aren't necessarily the happy functional friendships that leave you feeling warm inside, but rather these are the hard messy ones, the ones that teach us truths about ourselves and others.  She writes about:

• the casual friend who happens to be around the moment you experience something awful,
• the good friend that can't be found when you think need her,
• the friends you make when you become a mother,
• the friend who loses faith in after you make a decision that is contrary to her value system,
• and the friend that you weren't there for when she needed you.

She Matters is also about boundaries. I think everyone has a relationship that's suffered from breaking some boundary we either knew or didn't know was there, but Sonnenberg is one serious boundary breaker. She really pushes boundaries in ways I have not experienced. But this is probably why she's writing the books and I'm not.

And while she might be a little crazay, I related to a lot of her stories.  As I mentioned in my Galentines Day post, I miss my girlfriends and sometimes I long for those days when I spent hours on the phone with my them, had a fun night out with them or even just had a quick meet up for yoga and lunch.  On the positive side, I've made a lot of new friends as a mom and appreciate my coffee dates, trips to story time and playdates with these women. 

Sonnenberg's book reminded me of some of the friendships I've had. I don't keep in touch with many of my these old friends, but they do still matter so much to me.  

Do you recommend any good books? (Ones that I can read on the metro or late at night.)