Is Everyone Hanging out without me? Mindy Kaling

Read on the Kindle, recommended to me by Amazon.

I bought three books at the same time, this one, Bossypants and Man Repeller, and this is the one I chose to read first.

I know Mindy best as Kelly Kapoor from the American Office TV show.  This book is broadly a biography, in that it starts with Mindy growing up in an Indian American household.  As a dutiful daughter she is not rebellious, but her anecdotes from this time are sweet and funny.  It follows through her student years, then her break into show business.

Also covered are issues around her weight and appearance, and her experiences with dating.

An amusing and diverting read.

I Feel Bad about my Neck, Nora Ephron

Read on the Kindle, recommended by Amazon after some other books I bought.

Back in the mists of time I read Nora Ephron's novel Heartburn and loved it, so when a collection of her writings was suggested to me I thought, why not?

These essays are the gentler side of feminist ramblings, no man hating vitriol here, indeed Nora has been married 3 times. These are more musings on how women age and the effort we have to put in to keep looking presentable.

A sliver of a book, more an appetiser than a three course meal.

Maddaddam, Margaret Attwood

Read on the Kindle. The third in the trilogy after Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.

Once again told in flashback and also continuing the story from the end of The Year of the Flood, we discover the back story to Zeb, one of the minor characters from the first two books, and follow the lives of the flood survivors and the Crakers, genetically designed to outlive the humans.

One of the most interesting dimensions is that Crake never intended his race of genetically perfect humans to have religion, but the telling and retelling of the stories of how they came to be begin to become their folklore or tradition, and the tellers achieve prophet status.

What is disturbing about these books is that none of the technology mentioned is so outlandish that you couldn't believe it to be true.

Although I thought the first book in the trilogy is the strongest, I feel that this set of stories will one day be seen as a science fiction masterpiece.