Eric

The book that makes you happy to have gone to college.

It's been a number of years since this book was first published, and I still think it is excellent. Just as relevant now as ever (if not more so), and a very straightforward, sharply written, illuminating (and even very entertaining) first-person essay on trying to live like most Americans do: as unskilled laborers in the lower rungs of America's service industries. A decent amount of research footnotes the story to better inform readers. Most pleasing is that the author avoided writing this book as an anthem or a guilt-trip: she's never self-righteous about her assignment and she claims up front that she's not going “all the way” – in other words, she knows that temporarily acting like she has to live on minimum wage is a far cry from truly having to your whole life. Overall there's a lot to like here, and at about 200 pages, it's a quick, satisfying read.

So-so on this one. A really fun premise and some really yummy awfulness in the first half that kinda flattened out in the second as the author needed to figure out some kind of plot. The narrator's weird psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle is delightful and a highlight of the book. Reva is perfectly drawn as a significant/insignificant side character for the narrator. The semi-comatose trip to Reva's family home was great. I wish some inner (or outer) development in the two major conflicts for the narrator - grieving her troubled relationship with her dead parents, and reconciling her terrible years-long relationship with Trevor - were a larger factor in explaining *why* she is able to come out of her Infermiterol bender in a better place, instead of the thinly-wrought blackout relationship with Ping Xi and then magically being okay selling her parent's house and going outside to watch dogs on a park bench. Dunno, seemed kinda convenient that the first 8 months or whatever saw zero character growth and the last stunt was perfectly successful. I really liked how it was set just-enough before September 11, 2001 that you wondered the whole book if that event would be included or not. Overall it was a pretty fun doomer/goblin-mode read.