The Anxiety of Everyday Objects

This didn't quite do it for me, though it did grow on me a bit as it went on. Standard chick-lit sort of fare, with single girls yearning for more and lawyers and moral conflicts and finding oneself. But the author's way of describing things sometimes irked me, seemed oddly pretentious, and I am not sure I would much like Winona if I met her in real life.

Winona Bartlett is a wannabe film-maker living in New York City. Although she doesn't own a camera, she spends lots of time imagining her first film, to be called "The Anxiety of Everyday Objects," a plotless piece that will illustrate the ways in which we continually misperceive the world around us, for example when we misread a sign that says "Turn ahead" as "Turn ahead." Yet while Winona's artistic aspirations run to the philosophical and ponderous, her day-to-day life is, well, predictably boring. She works as a secretary in a small law firm where she obsessed about making coffee that is just the right strength for her boss, she lives alone with her cat Fruit Bat, she is bossed around by her self-centered older sister, and she dates show more a series of unsuitable men. Things start to change when her firm hires Sandy Spires, a mysterious, sophisticated blind lawyer to help with a lawsuit they're working on. Sandy shakes up the firm, but in the end, and frankly as any even somewhat astute reader could have guessed--Sandy turns out not to be who she seems, and the revelation of this leads to a series of events that set Winona on a much more promising course. The book ends with the kind of explain-it-all scene one sees in TV detective shows, as where Monk exclaims "Here's what happened."

Meh! show less

This book was a breezy 6 or 7 hours to get through. It was amusing if not terribly insightful or absorbing. Fairly typical girl-novel where nothing very consequential happens, but all is made well in the end by getting of crushable boy. Had so many aspects reminiscent of the movie "Secretary" I am convinced the author of the screenplay lifted much of the stroyline from this book. I found this a little distracting, particularly because I enjoyed the movie far more.

A little shallower than History Lesson for Girls. About a secretary in a law firm and her various relationships. It got a lot better halfway through - she packs her endings a bit improbably though.

My favorite thing about the book was the title, but it was a sweet and easy read during a stressful week.