Bossypants | Book Club Babe

Rating: 4 out of 5

Ever since I listened to Tina Fey’s Bossypants, I loved how audiobooks made my commute more enjoyable. Only interested in light-hearted books that require little concentration (because how hard would it be to pay attention to Moby Dick while avoiding crazy text-and-drivers?), I decided that Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) would make a good follow-up.

Mindy Kaling became famous for playing Kelly Kapoor on the American version of “The Office.” Her character is so obnoxiously shallow and narcissistic, but Mindy is actually someone most women could relate to. She’s a 30-something size-8 who likes gossip, guys with chest hair, and sneaking out of parties. I loved learning all the quirky tidbits about her, like how she creates revenge fantasies for her workouts, or how she hates the color navy.

Mindy talks about her childhood friends, her jobs leading up to “The Office,” and how she handles fame. She dishes on her co-stars Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson. Even her friends BJ Novak, Mike Schur, and Brenda Withers provide the other various voices on the audiobook.

Bossypants literally made me laugh out loud, but Is Everyone… still got me to chuckle every now and then. Even though Mindy’s not as funny as Tina in my opinion, I think younger readers will appreciate Mindy’s struggle to date men not boys, over Tina’s frustrations with the mommy wars. But if you’re a fan of female comedians, you’ll probably love both of them.

So got any more great audiobooks ideas? Only requirements: must be read by the author and offer lots of laughs!

Favorite Quote: “Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.”

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Rating: 5 out of 5

I’m back, fellow bloggers! Hope you all started the new year with a bang! Determined to broaden my horizons in 2012, I decided to buy my first audiobook. I was never interested in the medium after my middle school English teacher tortured us with an audio version of Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, an excruciatingly boring book about a boy lost in the wilderness.

But I thought I’d give audiobooks another shot and bought Tina Fey’s Bossypants on iTunes. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Tina Fey is the delightfully hilarious comedian who became famous for her work on “Saturday Night Live,” the chick-flick “Mean Girls” with Lindsay Lohan, and her show “30 Rock,” which is currently in its sixth season.

I had wanted to read Bossypants (2011) for the longest time, because absolutely everybody was raving about it. Since I knew it was going to be outrageously funny, I thought it would make my approx. 30 minute commute to and from work more bearable.

I was not disappointed. Tina narrated the audiobook herself, and her voice is so entertaining. She discusses everything from her bad-ass dad and facial scar, to her rise to fame with her various acting and writing gigs. She talks about meeting Sarah Palin after her popular impersonation with Amy Poelher, her horrendous honeymoon cruise, and her opinions on being a working mom. Part memoir, part improv, it’s what anyone should hope their life story sounds like.

What I love about Tina, and what makes her so relatable is her down-to-earth personality. She’s beautiful, but not of the supermodel quality, and when she says she was dorky as a child, she’s not just being modest (She even has a PDF full of old family photos to prove it!). But she’s also smart, sensible, and determined to battle sexism both at work and at home.

My only complaint is a practical issue. I know it takes a lot of time and effort to record an audiobook, but I spent over $20 for 5.5 hours of listening. If you paid attention to my commute time, I finished the book in less than a week. Thus, if I purchased audiobooks for the whole year, I would spend over $1000! Granted, I don’t regret buying it, but since paper books are so much cheaper and last a lot longer, audiobooks might have to be an every-now-and-then thing.

Overall, if you love Tina Fey, you’ll obviously love this book, but even you don’t know much about her, I bet you’ll still love it. I’m not lying when I say I was literally laughing out loud, to the point where I’m sure the drivers around me thought I was nuts. Sometimes when people can’t shut up about a book, you should tread lightly, but in this case, just jump right in! You won’t be sorry!

Favorite Quotes:

“This worked out perfectly for me in college, because what nineteen-year-old Virginia boy doesn’t want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that’s permed on top? What’s that you say? None of them want that? You are correct.”

“Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? ‘I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.’ The crowd cheers.”