Committed: A Love Story by Elizabeth Gilbert.......

This is the follow-up book to Eat, Pray, Love, and it was just as refreshing as the first book. After a painful divorce, Liz never wanted to marry again, even after she met Felipe, the love of her life. Like Liz, Felipe had survived a painful divorce and swore never to marry again, but the U.S. Government had other ideas.

In typical fashion, Gilbert set out to learn everything she could about the institution of marriage, not to learn ABOUT MARRIAGE, but to learn why she felt the way she did about marriage. Just like the first book, this non-fiction account reads very much like a novel, and it was compelling reading, even knowing from the beginning that they would live happily ever after. (That's not my spoiler - she tells us that at the beginning of the book.)

I love Gilbert's writing style. It's fresh, it's witty, it's honest, and it's sometimes self-deprecating. (Aside: Is it possible to be OTHER-deprecating? Just curious.) There are times when she ventures off into a detailed analysis of something she clearly cares a lot more about than I do, but it is worth plowing through those sections to enjoy the strawberry shortcake of the rest of the book. I have no idea why I just used that particular metaphor, because I don't even LIKE strawberry shortcake. It was a pretty stupid thing to say anyway, but in the interest of full disclosure of my idiocy, I'm leaving it in there instead of employing the delete key.

I am very envious of the way Gilbert strings words together. I KNOW all those words, and I know what MOST of them mean, yet I cannot seem to string them together the way she does. See what I mean? I just used the phrase "string [words] together" twice in the same paragraph, and I'm sure that's an explicitly stated no-no in the writer's handbook.

Another indication of my idiocy: At the end of a book, I'm not satisfied just reading the "The End" part. I actually read the author's acknowledgements at the end, fully aware that I won't know a soul she mentions. My name is never there. In reading the acknowledgements at the end of Committed, I discovered that Liz Gilbert and I have something else in common. Something in addition to our wittiness, our clever writing, and our thoughtful analyses of our lives. Yeah, right.

Liz professes a tendency to overuse the word "actually."

I think we're sisters or something.