April Ins and Outs: What I Bought and Read This Month

April was a month of varying obsessions for me. The books I read seemed to come in pairs as each lead me to the next.

Oddly, Mary Roach's Gulp, an exploration of the digestive tract, put me in the mood to read about the extreme foodie-ism Dana Goodyear covers in Anything That Moves.

The Dinner, a story of parents dealing with the horror of their son's violence reminded me to read We Need to Talk About Kevin, which has been on my TBR list since I became obsessed with psychopathy after reading The Psychopath Test a couple years ago.

On a lighter note, Sarah Vowell's Hawaiian history, Unfamiliar Fishes put in in the mood to tackle another novel that has long been on my list, The Descendants.

While I was at it, I read Sideways which, like The Descendants, was a movie I enjoyed so much I thought I should give the book a go. This is the reverse order of how I prefer to enjoy film adaptations, but it works almost as well. I went ahead and rented the movie We Need to Talk About Kevin as well as the movie version of Never Let Me Go, both of which I'd been putting off seeing until reading the books.

Never Let Me Go was my book club book last month, and I think I enjoyed it more than anyone else in our group, though not so much as I expected to, given all the raving I've heard from friends who've read it and various voices around the bookternet.

Of the books I acquired last month, I've only starting The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Sex Criminals. So far I'm enjoying both quite a lot.