January's Best Reads

A Bad Idea Of What I’m About To Do: True Tales of Seriously Poor Judgment and Stunningly Awkward Adventure (Da Capo Press)

By Chris Gethard

Don’t you think a great way to feel more hopeful about not fulfilling your New Years resolutions is to read about someone else’s funny failures in life? Actor, comedian and star of his own show, Gethard is an absolute hoot. From his awkward first kiss to “My Lows at Loews” cinema, he riffs about. “maniacal weirdos” even as he shines the spotlight on his own hilarious, dangerous and sometime idiotic escapades. Even the titles, “My Father is Not the Kindly Mustachioed Man He Seems” are hysterical. For Gethard, life “has always been semi-ridiculous” and in this smart, brave, funny collection of essays, he takes you along for the ride.

Girl Land (Reagan Arthur Books)

 By Caitlin Flanagan

Remember your first period? Your first kiss? Or the mortifying things you wrote in your diary that you prayed no one would ever see? Transitioning from awkward girl to young woman can be like walking across a flower field strewn with explosives, but over the decades, this rite of passage has supposedly gotten easier. But has it, really? Flanagan goes back to the time when girls needed chaperones and menstruation took place only in the home and then shows how the private life of girls has grown alarmingly public. Girls today might have gained some freedoms, but they’ve surely lost others, argues Flanagan. She urges dads to be more involved in their daughter’s lives (good advice), but she also insists that a girl’s bedroom should be an Internet free zone, (bad advice), showing no knowledge of the painting, music, film and writing software any creative lass would love. Still, this is a great book for parents, and I’d also put this book in the hands of any young inhabitant of Girl Land.

Smut: Stories (Picador)

By Alan Bennett

Admit it, you were grabbed by the title. But the two subversive stories inside are anything but smutty. Instead, Bennett presents two rollickingly tender tales of people yearning for bodily –and soul–connection. In “The Greening of Mrs. Donaldson,” a recent widow performs as a patient for medical students and soon takes on an even randier role with her tenants in exchange for their rent.  “The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes” follows Graham, married to a woman and gay, who keeps his double life a secret from his proper, middleclass mom only to find that things are definitely not what they seem to be. Truly, the only thing obscene about Smut would be to miss reading it.

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, and she has never made a New Year’s resolution she hasn’t broken.