Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia / Marya Hornbacher / 304 pp.

This is a very personal, gritty, dark book that examines Marya's eating disorder from when it started as Bulimia at age 9, to her turning to Anorexia as a teen, and finally, her tentative present day relationship with eating disorders. For anyone interested in the mindset of eating disorders, this is a very intimate look that goes many dark places.

However, as with “The Best Little Girl in the World,” I feel compelled to mention numerous Amazon reviews from current or previous anorexics who warn that this book can be used as a how-to guide and has extremely strong trigger-points.

Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West / Anne Seagraves / 165 pp.

This book's content stayed true to its title, giving a story-based look at prostitution in the American West. There are explanations of each of the prostitution hierarchies that existed, excerpts from funerals of famous madams, and pictures and stories about key ladies told in a fictional style. The book stays away from gritty details, except the heartbreaking chapter about the organized slavery and forced prostitution of Chinese girls and young women.

How's Your Romance/Ethan Mordden/288 pp.

Subtitled "concluding the 'Buddies' Cycle", How's Your Romance is the last in a series of Mordden novels about a group of gay men living in New York City. The narrator, Bud, is loosely based on Mordden himself, a writer and known authority on Broadway musicals. Unlike many gay novels, which deal with the coming-out process or with the effects of the AIDS epidemic, the "Buddies" novels tell stories about a group of friends who also, incidentally, happen to be gay. The "coming out" and AIDS topics are included, but the novels deal with them as parts of the overall gay experience.
Mordden is one of my favorite writers; his sense of humor matches mine, and his attempts to show that gay people are humans too really hit home to me. Unlike characters in such gay "standards" as The Boys in the Band and the TV series "Queer as Folk", Mordden's group truly care for each other; they may tease, but they avoid really hurting one another.
The theme to this final volume in the cycle seems to be change. Bud's cousin, Ken, belongs to a group of gym-bunny "Chelsea Boys", only interested in surface topics and sex. Ken realizes that it's time for him to mature a bit and step away from these so-called "friends". Bud's naive young lover, Cosgrove, is forced to understand that his former best friend "J" ("Little Kiwi" or "Virgil" in previous stories) has changed and is no longer interested in the crazy activities they used to do together. And by the end of the novel, a "straight dude" roommate of one of the guys comes to the realization that he is gay.
As I said before, I really love Mordden's writing. This volume is perhaps not as strong as previous chapters of the "Buddies" cycle, but it's still a very enjoyable read. I heartily recommend it to "budding homos" and "curious breeders" alike!

Lolita/Vladimir Nabokov/317 pp.

On its surface, Nabokov's Lolita is the story of an older man's attempt to seduce a young girl. The narrator, Humbert Humbert, rents a room from Charlotte Haze so that he can be close to her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (or Lolita). While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte proposes marriage to Humbert, and he accepts in order to continue living in the house with Lolita. When Charlotte discovers that Humbert is infatuated with Lolita, she threatens to expose his secret; as she storms out of the house, she is killed by a passing car. Humbert goes to the camp and picks up Lolita, telling her that her mother is in the hospital and that he is taking her to the hospital. Instead, they go on a long cross-country trip, during which Lolita actually seduces Humbert. During their trip, Humbert uses persuasion, bribes, and threats of reform school to keep Lolita tied to him, and to get her to perform sexual favors. After a year on the road, the two move to a small New England town, where Lolita is enrolled in a private school; while there, she meets another older man, who plots with her to escape from Humbert. However, this new man soon grows tired of Lolita, and kicks her out on the street. When she eventually reconnects with Humbert, she is 17 years old, married, pregnant, and poor. Humbert gives her money in exchange for the name of the man who stole her from him, and then he goes and murders that man. Humbert is soon captured by the police, and the book is written in the form of a sort of confession of the murder and the events that led to it.
While early readers of the novel labeled it as erotica or a romance, Nabokov (and other critics) insist that isn't the case. The majority of the book deals with the narrator's attempts to keep Lolita under his control, and his realization (later on) that he has deprived her of the opportunity to experience a normal childhood. The writer Martin Amis claimed that Lolita was Nabokov's condemnation of how Stalinism destroyed the simplicity of the Russia of Nabokov's childhood.
When Nabokov first tried to get the book published, it was turned down by all the major publishing houses. He finally managed to get it published by a smaller press; it then proceeded to be banned in both Britain and France, before eventually being a bestseller in the U.S. (possibly because of the hype associated with it being banned elsewhere).

Tobacco Road/Erskine Caldwell/184 pp.

First published in 1932, this book is considered one of the key novels written about the Great Depression, often compared with Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. It's the story of the Lester family, sharecroppers in Georgia. Jeeter Lester's ancestor had been a man of some importance in the area, owner of a large tobacco plantation; over the course of several generations, the family's fortunes had turned, to the point that Jeeter's father had sold off the last of the family lands. Jeeter now lives as a sharecropper on land that his family once owned; he is so poor he can't even afford to buy the seed and fertilizer to plant crops on the land, and his family survives mostly by scrounging for bark and berries in the nearby woods. The family is so hungry that, when Jeeter's son-in-law, Lov, comes to talk to him, carrying a bag of turnips, they beat him with sticks to steal the turnips from him.
The book details the severity of the Lester family's poverty, and the various things they do to try and improve their condition. Their biggest fear is that their condition will worsen to the point that they are lower on the social ladder than the black families that live near them. They have sunk so low, due to their poverty and hunger, that they are reduced to the most primal of animal urges - finding food and finding someone to mate with. The family's interaction with Lov is reminiscent of a pack of wolves or hyenas - they are all sitting and lying around their yard as he approaches, but their minds and bodies prick up when he comes in sight, carrying the bag of turnips, and they move as a pack to trick him out of the food.
The book is an easy read, and a good illustration of the problems faced by poor farmers in the South during the Depression.

Monk in the Inner City / Mary Lou Kownacki / 176 p.

Let's start with this: Mary Lou Kownacki is NOT your average nun, or at least, not what I, in my apparent small mindedness, envisioned a nun to be like.  In a series of stories, recollections, and simple thoughts arranged in alphabetical groupings, Mary Lou leads the readers on a spiritual journey. Mary Lou is a Benedictine Sister living in Erie, Pennsylvania, attempting to "stretch [her] monk's robe until it embraces the suffering world."  She offers insights to a variety of topics from angels to Thomas Merton to zen wisdom and everything in between.

Reading this was actually a lot more fun than I expected.  Sister Mary Lou is a bit of radical, at least in my mind.  She participates in peace demonstrations and gets thrown in jail.  She advocates for better roles for women in the Catholic Church.  She surprised me at every turn.  Her stories tugged at your heartstrings and made you stop and think.  I felt like she made you stop and reconsider your preconceived notions about monastic life and about religion/Christianity in general.  An enlightening read.

Shadow / Jenny Moss / 384 p.

Shadow's job is to protect the queen, who is fated to die before her sixteenth birthday..  To stay with her every minute of every day, experiencing everything she does. Shadow is less than a servant; she has no standing whatsoever.  While the young queen is doted upon, Shadow is unknown, unloved, uncared-for. Without a name or identity of her own, but only a burning desire for freedom, she waits, and always plots her escape. 
But when her freedom becomes possible through the queen's death, Shadow discovers that not everything is as she thought, and that freedom and love both exact a high price. 

This joins my list of royal bodyguard books, along with Mistwood (which is excellent) and The Decoy Princess. This is an interesting book; the characters were surprisingly layered in parts for fantasy, but then they kept falling back into flat roles. An interesting book.