What I Read -- Am I There Yet?

I've started and finished my next postal book club book: Am I There Yet? The Loop-de-Loop, Zigzagging Journey to Adulthood.  It is part graphic novel, part memoir, and part advice book.

I think this may have been more meaningful to me a handful of years ago, but nevertheless it was enjoyable, if a bit inconsistent.  Parts were touching and poignant -- especially when she actually talked about her father's death (rather than mentioning it in passing, which got old) or had a real revelation.  Other parts were a bit simplistic and seemed unnecessary to the stories.

Let me return for a minute to my earlier description of this book as "part graphic novel."  It's really, now that I think about it, more "part adult picture book."  I think of a graphic novel as a book that tells the story through images, an elaborate comic strip.  In Am I There Yet?, the pictures are illustrations.  They do add something to the story -- my favorite ones were the double-page-spread summaries of the author's favorite things about various places that she had been or times in her life -- but if you were to remove the illustrations, everything would still make perfect sense.

Come to think of it, maybe she has a future in travel writing.

One final thought: there is something nice about a quick read. When you've been struggling to finish a few books lately, a quick read can sometimes be just the re-energizing jolt you need to get motivated to read again.