So I’ve just completed not one but two books!  Both of them I borrowed from Larisa.  One I really liked.  The other not so much:

Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper:  The verdict?  Meh.  This book was okaaaay, but didn’t really do it for me.   It was kind of like a Cliff notes version of an actual memoir of a journalist.  I mean it was readable – maybe I was expecting too much from Anderson.  

Whateva.  And then there’s the other book….

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill:  This is a great book – it’s about an aging ex-model with hepatitis looking back on her friendship with a dowdy fag-hag who eventually dies of AIDS.  Gaitskill has a way with language that I really admire and she made a subject that I would not necessarily have been drawn to on my own extremely compelling.  Her characters are deeply flawed and seem very real and I like that.  At times I wondered how much Alison, the ex-model character is taken from the author herself.  Anyways, I really liked it a lot.