Moxie: I am (still) a horrible person

Highly Recommended

Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi: The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke
Reading this book explained a whole lot of things about why so many families I know are struggling financially, even though we don't spend extravagantly. Simultaneously enlightening and nauseating.
Elizabeth Warren: All Your Worth : The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan
If other personal finance books have frustrated you because they assume you have money to invest and you don't even have enough money to buy a large coffee, this is the personal finance book for you. Reading this book showed me that it's not that I waste money on stupid things--it's that our basic expenses are too high to begin with. Reading this book is the end of financial guilt and the beginning of getting out of the hole.
Adele Faber: Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too
Lots of great ideas to think about and put into practice about not assigning your kids roles and how to approach fights. Also goes over some of the stuff from the How to Talk So Kids Will Listen book about making kids feel understood. Because, really, that's all anyone wants--to be understood. And kids are people, too.
Anne Lamott: Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year
Just perfect. A beautiful, funny, sad, accurate account of what the first days, weeks, and months with a baby are like. This is exactly what your journal would be, if you could write as well as she does.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc: Random Family : Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
LeBlanc's writing and pacing makes you want to keep reading despite the tragic story. Think you have an informed opinion about welfare reform and how to strengthen families in this country? Not until you've read this book.
John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
This is the red pill. Don't read it if you want to stay comfortable with the American school system. Gatto goes into why government-owned schools were created and the things they actually teach us.
Ellis Avery: The Smoke Week: September 11-21, 2001
If you have any curiosity about what it was like for New Yorkers during the World Trade Center attacks, this is the book to read. A brilliant, crystalline, spot-on memoir of the week or so after the attacks, this book is an ode to New Yorkers. Realistic, clean, and completely un-maudlin, it's just the story of what it was like for us. This is what should go into a time capsule to represent September 2001.

because I just cannot shake the monkey on my back that is the entire Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise. They mess with people's lives (people who volunteer to be messed with, yes, but still) and yet I cannot turn away from the trainwreck.

OK. I just made a momentous decision: I am only going to let myself watch this show if I'm knitting at the time, so I can at least come out of it with something other than compromised moral principles.

Now. If you watched the first ep of Ali's season of The Bachelorette this Monday, you may have noticed the same thing I did: Many many of the men seemed to have Mom Issues. Dead moms, sick moms, moms who taught them manners, moms who were abandoned or mistreated by their dads.

I wonder why that is, or if it was just the particular selection of men who were featured on Monday. Will it come into play later? That Kasey guy is clearly a little off (and I thought that even before seeing the promo for next week)--he reminds me of the freaky intensity Jake had on Gillian's season.

I like the professional wrestler, personally. But my money's on Chris from Cape Cod.