Since my slow internet connection currently prevents me from reading much of interest online, I thought I'd update you all on the books I'm reading. (These days my pleasures are low-tech indeed.)

The first one is called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young, and it falls neatly into a genre that I've been expecting for years: the personal memoir written as though one were actually a protagonist in a Nick Hornsby/Helen Fielding novel. The jacket blurb actually describes the author as "a male Bridget Jones," which presumably means that he's a desperate singleton with a job in publishing. (In that case, this means that I'll be a male Bridget Jones before too long. Oh hell...)

More specifically, Toby Young was a British reporter who came to work as a staff writer for Vanity Fair in the mid-90s, and so the book is rife with gossip about his fellow writers, editors, and the magazine trade in general. It's a fun read, and perfectly tailored for a movie adaptation. (Young even mentions, repeatedly, that he's a Philip Seymour Hoffmann lookalike.) It's supposedly a chronicle of Young's rapid rise and disastrous fall, as he was fired from his job, sued by Tina Brown, etc. But it's hard to feel too sorry for a man who not only graduated from Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard and wrote for Vanity Fair, but who also mentions offhand that he once dated Natascha McElhone, who happens to be one of the most beautiful women in the entire world. (You might recognize her as the love interest in The Truman Show.)

Toby Young dated this woman, and he expects us to feel amused pity at his repeated gaffes on the romantic scene? I'm sorry, but (Penelope Cruz voice here) somehow I can't play the violin for this guy.