Murder by Death

I was ready to give this a solid 4 stars: a solid collection of essays and columns written by Nora Ephron.  They were all good and mostly amusing, although none of them made me laugh out loud.

Then I got to the last essay, Considering the Alternative and she wowed me.  She had me laughing out loud at the beginning of it and awestruck at the simple truth of the end of it.  This last essay about the truth and inevitability of death is worth the entire book, so I gave it that last half-star.

Also, many quotable bits, but my favorite, I think, is this:

Reading is everything.  Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person.  Reading makes me smarter.  Reading gives me something to talk about later on.  Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself.  Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.  Reading is grist.  Reading is bliss.

Amen.