Which Brings Me To You

I'm reading this book I found on the library display shelf, Which Brings Me to You. I was pretty skeptical checking it out yesterday. Couldn't quite tell what kind of book it would be. It's fiction, a series of confessional letters between two people who met briefly at a wedding. Looking at the premise of the book, and the cover, and the two authors' photographs, I thought maybe I was checking out a beach read by mistake, like one of those Shop-A-Holic books or the Nanny Diaries or whatever.

But this book is great. The writing's really fresh and funny. At one point the woman's describing her parents' perception of university culture. She says, "A pair of art professors lived on our street. My parents treated them like they were giraffes. If they didn't mow their lawn or take their garbage around back, my parents forgave them with a kind of shrug that seemed to say: Can't blame them. They're giraffes after all. God bless 'em, they only have hooves."

Describing his first time at a shooting range, the man writes, "It shocked me how much the gun wanted to move. It leapt about in my hands, like a heavy fish." I can feel that gun even though I've never held one. He tells the woman "Beauty is the cure of the weak." Not a cure for weakness, but the cure of the weak. I like that.

These two authors have given me way more than I was expecting. It's still light reading, for sure, but crafted and funny.