Reading: Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities by Alexandra Robbins.  I was looking forward to reading this book for awhile, and sadly, I am rather disappointed in it, for two main reasons. 

1) I assumed that white sororities were pretty much useless and anachronistic, racist and elitist, full of fake feminism, eating disorders, binge drinking, and date rape.  Reading Robbins’s book has not proven any of my assumptions wrong (but I do have some rather horrible examples of everything in the above list to chew on).  I kept waiting for her to tell me something that I didn’t know. 

2) The book’s organization is very uneven.  There are two components to each chapter: a series of anecdotes and interviews with the four sorority sisters Robbins follows over the course of a year, coupled with a breakdown of a related element of sorority history (e.g. rituals, hazing, pledge methods, rush practices, etc.).  The former component is engaging and interesting, as Robbins casts the lively girls in a critical but forgiving light.  The latter component, in comparison, feels dry and forced, and sometimes not explicitly related to the anecdotal section of the chapter.  I found myself skimming through these parts (particularly the ones about door-song rituals during rush week) to get to the sections on the girls. 

Surprisingly, this would make a reasonable beach/backyard read, as the girls are easy to become interested in, and the interviews that Robbins conducts with various sorority girls through the country where they basically admit that they are horrible people and have no idea why they do what they do are guiltily pleasurable to read.  Not a poorly written book, per se, but not as weighty as it could have been.

Just Finished: Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler.  Nobody does it better.  You can practically hear a Humphrey Bogart-type muttering the entire book from around a cigarette and over a trench-coat collar.