Review: Just My Type

Just My Type
Simon Garfield

★★★½☆

2011 (originally published 2010) • 384 pages • Gotham

I was at Michael’s the other day with a friend, in search of black wrapping paper to cover the shoeboxes I have lying around my apartment. (They have to be black to go in my room, you see, so I can put stuff in them. I have a system. A very goth system.) I always end up gravitating towards the cheap tchotchkes, and I discovered a cute little journal emblazoned with the phrase (and title of a very catchy Selena Gomez song) “Kill them with kindness.” Well, it would have been cute, if the font had been a dreamy, Pinterest-worthy script and not terrifyingly sharp block letters.

It’s things like this that remind me of the importance and beauty of typography, and it’s kind of a coincidence that I was halfway through Just My Type and seeing serifs the way David Krumholtz’s character sees patterns in Numb3rs. (That’s, like, a hip reference, right? I am so disconnected from the television landscape and yet, I save absolutely no time.)

Review: Girl Walks Into a Bar

Girl Walks Into a Bar
by Rachel Dratch

★★★½☆

2012 • 272 pages • Gotham

Hear ye, hear ye—my Saturday Night Live fandom has only grown more passionate over the last two years. Captain Cinema and I have at last escaped Chevy Chase on our tour of the entirety of the show, I may or may not finally satisfy my morbid curiosity about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and I am starting to feel like I’m ready to crack open my pristine copy of Live From New York to read it chapter by chapter. And so begins my descent into the various literary offerings concerning Saturday Night Live and its children.

Rachel Dratch predates my Saturday Night Live cast; I began watching in 2007 (and thus will always have warm, fuzzy feelings about Casey Wilson, so, you know, Gone Girl was fun) and began watching seriously in 2010. But even though she left the show in 2006, I was always aware of her through her most famous character, Debbie Downer, the occasional E! rerun of early aughts episodes, and being regaled with several repeat performances of “Lovers” on my college trip to Ireland. Not so much through her post-Saturday Night Live work, which is a shame, since she’s a delight.

Review: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves
by Lynn Truss

After an minor fandom disagreement over punctuation that couldn’t be cleared up, I became a lot more interested in punctuation clarification. I consider myself fairly punctuation aware. At a young age, my mother told me that confusing “it’s” and “its” meant I was illiterate. This was after I had showed her some of my angsty preteen poetry; I was so offended that it’s been ingrained into me. Oh, preteen self, how I want to punch you in the teeth.