Everyone Worth Knowing by Lauren Weisberger

PLOT Nice girl from a hippie-organic background joins an upscale PR agency and becomes a shallow, weight-and-fashion-obsessed borderline bimbo with the "in crowd" at the "in crowd" clubs of Manhattan. Lots of lovingly described apparel - a setting filled with gorgeous people relentlessly pursuing the life of the rich, famous and useless. Happily, girl is saved at the very end by down-to-earth prince charming.
Why in the world did I pick this book The Devil Wears Prada - I saw the movie (which I enjoyed), so I should have known better (plots like this play better on the big screen). I thought Weisberger was true chicklit and I should experience one of her books.
COMMENT If I hadn't listened to this book, I probably would have given up in the first 50 pages, but, as I've said, I have a long commute, so, with a book on CD, I'm not really wasting too much time. To enjoy Everyone Worth Knowing, you have to really care about,well, everyone worth knowing, be able to understand all the inside jokes, recognize the celebrity names, and know your Prada from a whatever (see, I don't and I don't care - can't even think of a designer). Bette Robinson is appealing enough to engage your interest, but, in 20 years, books like this one will be soooo passe, dahling. You can only go so far with pop culture. Weisberger, is a skilled writer, however - she skillfully skewers the players in this milieu just by describing them, BUT, it just wasn't my kind of book. Sigh - maybe I'm just too old to get it.
Reader Stina Nielsen was OK, just OK. Her reading lacked expression and was not convincing in many places. Too often, she sounded like a grade 11 drama student trying out for the lead part in a high school play.

No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

PLOT Llewelyn Moss, young Vietnam vet out hunting antelope, stumbles into a drug deal gone really, really bad -several dead men, a stash of heroin, and 2.4 million dollars. Even though he knows he's making a potentially fatal mistake, Lewelyn grabs the money and runs, and the chase begins immediately. He is now a the prey, hunted by miscellaneous Mexicans, the psycopath Chigurh and an ex-Special Forces agent. Set along the Texas-Mexico border in 1980, No Country for Old Men is an action-thriller laced with the thoughts of "the good guy," WWII vet, Sheriff Bell, who is himself hunting Moss to save him and his 19-year-old wife.
Why I Picked this Book My daughter, Savannah, recommended it.
COMMENTS No Country has enough action,with elements of old shoot-em-up westerns, to rivet the most rabid of action fans. By the time you arrive at the last page, the body count is quite large. Again, as in The Road, McCarthy's style is lean and quick. The dialogue is rapid fire, often propelling the story, acurately reflecting dialect. But, this novel works on another, deeper level in Bell's observations about the moral decline of our time - our slide into the world of The Road, perhaps. These digressions do not slow the action, but rather provide a moral underpining for the plot. And, there are echoes from The Road, particularly striking as Bell talks about his dead father: "And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somethere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there." Gave me chills.
FORMAT NOTE I both listened to and read No Country. (Listened in the car during my commute and read at night.) The narrator, Tom Stechschulte, was excellent. His vocal characterizations were superb. I could immediately recognize which character was talking.