Sleep is for the Weak

Yay! The first BlogHer book, Sleep is for the Weak, is awesome. It’s also difficult to review properly but I’m going to give it a try.

I picked up my copy (and my sister’s copy), at the Macy’s party, and walked through the line to have it signed (that’s me in the weird brown jacket) by a bunch of the brilliant bloggers in the compilation. Lisa said, “have you read my essay?” When I said I hadn’t, she gave me THAT look and laughed. I looked at what she wrote in my copy and it made me very very nervous…

Fast forward to later that evening, back in my hotel room, I picked up my copy and read the acknowledegement and flipped through the index thinking about which bloggers I’ve been reading for years, which I used to read but stopped reading, which I read from time to time, which I’ve never read at all and which I have tried to read but just never felt a connection to. And then, I put the book down and went to sleep.

I picked it up again when I got home and immediately flipped to Lisa’s essay, nervously. And then I laughed. She’s such a TEASE. (TW read the book last night and her response to Lisa’s essay was “THAT is Lisa Stone. That’s who she is, that’s what she sounds like all of the time.” Heh. So true, but she’s also a TEASE.)

I flipped back to the beginning and read Stacy Morrison’s forward and it was awesome. Really awesome. Who knew the EIC of Redbook could use the word FUCK so often? Not me. (TW’s response to the forward was “The book is worth buying just for the forward.” – she’s right, it is.)

Then, on to the rest of the essays – and I loved it. Some of them I had read on the writer’s blog – Three Kid Circus, Fussy, Mir, Mom 101, Not Calm Dot Calm – all bloggers I read every single day. When I read an essay that I remembered from the blog, I immediately thought “oh I wish Rita had included this and that and that other post too!” Blogging is like that – one post sparks a memory of another one and I think it’s good that the book sparks the same thoughts.

There are bloggers who I’ve never read and will now start reading because I loved their essays.

There are bloggers who I have never read, though have tried to read them because everyone loves them – but they didn’t grab me on their blogs. They still didn’t grab me in the book. And again, I think this is good. We don’t all love the same bloggers. We don’t all love the same voices or stories or experiences or ideas. That’s what blogging is and that’s what a book written by bloggers should feel like.

Rita – you did a great job with this book. Congratulations. Seriously.