Lovely Photos and Nora Ephron

If you'd enjoy seeing some gorgeous photos of almost anything, check out Pink Is the Word.


Like the contrast of winter/spring in these two
photos.

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I've just finished reading Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck and loved it.  I haven't reviewed it yet on my book blog, but Ephron's voice is so engaging and her short essays have both universal and personal appeal.  Some of the essays are so funny and truthful, and the last one is so touching and so honest about the loss of friends and loved ones that inevitably become more frequent as we grow older.  

Ephron takes such mundane topics as maintenance requirements of women of a certain age and makes us laugh at our own personal challenges with aging and our regrets about the process.  Who doesn't, after a certain age, regret the need for reading glasses and our inability to locate them (despite having multiple pairs), the temptation to dye our hair or resort to Botox, the effort to maintain our physical fitness, and more--whether we succumb to these temptations or not?

In one way, some of the essays are superficial; Ephron highlights some of the common situations women encounter (finding the perfect purse and then being able to locate anything within the dark recesses of said purse), but although this may be superficial and not an earth-shattering situation, it is, at least for me, a search that continues--both for the perfect purse and for locating anything in that black hole of necessary objects.  The real problem is more that disorganized people like myself believe that a purse will solve the problem that results from stuffing everything from lists, receipts, old tickets, another chapstick, books and notebooks, etc. into a purse.  No purse will solve my disorganized tendencies, and yet....

Anyway, thanks Nancy (of Pomegranate Trail) for recommending the book!

Still reading two other books of essays and a couple of novels, but couldn't resist celebrating Ephron's witty essays because they made me laugh and, truthfully, even think.  Maybe not always about important topics, but certainly about the vagaries of our culture.