Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Hi!

Guess what!  This is my 100th blog post!  I've had so much fun writing these posts and I can't wait to write more!  I've also just recently passed 5,000 views.  Thank you so much for reading! :)

On our Puerto Rico trip I read the book Yes Please by Amy Poehler, which I got for my birthday!  I absolutely loved it.

I had the best spots ever to read while we were in San Juan :)

The book is split up into three sections: Part One: Say Whatever You Want, Part Two: Do Whatever You Like, and Part Three: Be Whoever You Are.  Amy describes her book as part memoir, part advice, and part essays, and each sections contains several of each of these.  There are tons of old pictures, papers, etc. "taped" into the book, and those are so fun to see!

She talks so much about improv, which I loved reading about.  She tells the story about when she first realized that she liked being able to choose what came next while she was on stage.  You get to read all about the different groups she was part of and/or started, such as the Upright Citizens Brigade, and how they grew and evolved over time (even currently!).  She tells stories about the people she performed and worked with and how she moved to Chicago and then New York City.

I loved hearing about her time on Saturday Night Live, too!  She tells what the process is like every week during the season, writing sketches, reading them, finding out which get to be on the show, rehearsing with the guest hosts, staying up until the early morning on Saturday, the day of a show.  It sounds so fun and so stressful!

There are lots of stories about her baby boys, some about her ten-year marriage to Will Arnett, tons about her childhood, growing up with her parents and younger brother in Massachusetts, the drugs she's done in the past, and the ones she's stayed away from.  Just a lot of good stuff!  She doesn't try to make it sound like she's had a perfect life, but she acknowledges that she's lucky to have grown up in a safe and loving home.

Her show Parks and Recreation is another huge topic, of course, and I loved hearing about what it was like to work with the cast of the show!  It sounds like they had such a blast.  Alex and I watched the two new episodes of the last season last week and it was even more fun to watch it now that I've read her book!  She talks about how they're like one big family and you can tell that they all must be great friends!  I'm sad that this is the last season of the show.  It's so hilarious.  

It was so fun to read about the different pranks/skits she did while hosting the Golden Globes with Tina Fey twice (the most recent time was too recent to be in the book!).  It sounds like so many of the famous people Amy knows and is friends with are just so nice and fun!  Like Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Louis C.K., Seth Meyers (there are tons of great stories about them meeting and becoming great friends, and he also wrote a chapter of the book!), Maya Rudolph, all of her SNL and Parks and Rec friends, etc.

I already knew it, but after reading her book, I can just tell even more that Amy is such a normal, real, nice person.  Parts of the book are hilarious, because she is, but so much of it is normal stories about her normal life.  Some parts are a little bit sad, some parts talk about how lucky she knows she is to have her life, but also how hard she had to work to get where she is today.  It's a very good book and I loved it!

I would definitely recommend this book to anybody who loves Amy Poehler, likes comedy of any kind, or just wants an interesting, funny, book to read!  Have any of you read this yet?  What did you think??

Thanks for reading!

Two Book Reviews

Hello!

I just recently read This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  I loved both!  They actually reminded me a little of each other and since I read them one after the other, I sometimes mixed them up in my head :)  Both are now movies that we haven't seen yet, but hopefully we'll see them soon!  I don't give anything away in this post, so you can read it even if you haven't read the books :)

This Is Where I Leave You was really easy to read, which I love.  If a book is too complicated or hard to read, I just can't do it!  It's about a family who is sitting shiva after their father passes away.  Since the family never spends that much time together under one roof, it drives them all a little crazy.  It is told from the perspective of the middle brother, who has a lot going on in his life aside from his father dying.  You get to see how he deals with (or doesn't deal with) his life during everything else that's happening.

You get to see how the siblings interact with each other, with their mom, and with all of the people who come to visit while they're sitting shiva.  I liked it because nothing about the book seemed unbelievable.  Everything that happened was pretty normal.  You get to learn a little about the family's lives and the problems they're dealing with outside of that week, too.

I thought it was really good and I'd recommend it!

Gone Girl was really suspenseful and good!  It's pretty disturbing, too.  I really like how it's written - alternating between the present time from the husband's perspective, and the past from the wife's journal entries.  Going back and forth between what is happening in the husband's life after the incident (I don't want to spoil anything!) and what the wife was writing about for a few years leading up to it makes it even more of a mystery!  It also makes it hard to decide whose side you're on!  I kept changing my mind about what I thought really happened and who did what!  If you like thriller books then I think you would like this!

My mom and I each added one of Gillian Flynn's other books to our Birchbox orders (they were free when you spent $35+!) sand I got my order in the mail today!!  I got Sharp Objects and she got Dark Places.  Can't wait to start reading!

Thanks for reading!

What I'm Currently Reading

Hello!

I am soo sleepy so this is going to be short!  It was a chilly day that started out SO rainy!  Alex and I got up super early to try and go to the MVA, Maryland's version of the DMV, and do more car stuff.  It turns out we still didn't have everything we needed (grr), so we just took a wet, windy walk to the car, drove part of the way there, and then I dropped Alex off at school!  Fun morning :)

Tonight is the last night we could go to a Charm City Yoga class as part of our 30 days for $25 (for first-time students there).  We went to a beginner vinyasa class and it was great!  We really loved the teacher.

Tonight, season 3 of Scandal started!  It was so good and intense.  We also watched How to Get Away with Murder, which was good, too!  

I'm always kind of reading several books at one time, but right now I'm mostly reading This is Where I Leave You.

There is a movie out now that's based on it with sooo many actors we like!  Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, Adam Driver, etc.  I want to finish reading it before we see it!  It's good so far!  I'm about 50 pages in.

I want to read a few pages before I can't keep my eyes open anymore, so I'd better go!

Thanks for reading!