Gossip Girl: I Will Always Love You by Cecily von Ziegesar

I know I wasn't going to read any more Gossip Girl books, but I saw this book on my library's epub offerings and I just couldn't help myself. So much happens in this book and I really loved every dirty second. I'll break the plots down for you:

We start out with Blair with her Yale boyfriend, Serena single, Dan and Vanessa together. Blair ditches Yale boyfriend because his family won't let her come on vacation with them ("No ring, no bring") and immediately hooks up with Nate. Nate has been sailing the high seas with his mentor Chips. Now that Nate has returned, all of the Upper East Side ladies are lining up. After all, nothing says hot like an unmotivated stoner. Serena becomes jealous because of the great connection between her and Nate. She has been filming the sequel to her dumb Breakfast at Tiffany's remake, but walks off the set to declare her love for Nate. He can't decide between the two girls. It's a full-on cat fight with the girls, and then Nate decides he just can't take it and leaves to go to farm college (More on that later).

Dan and Vanessa are together despite living on opposite coasts. Dan has had enough of college out West and transfers East without telling Vanessa. They are all set to be playing hipster house together in the Brooklyn Humphrey apartment when Dan catches Vanessa in bed with her former TA.

Now, random relationship generator!

Blair gets back together with Yale boyfriend. Serena stays single. Their relationship is still rocky. Nate returns from farm college after Chips dies of cancer. Farm college had been doing him good, but he becomes distraught at Chip's death and hits the booze and wacky tobacky some more. Then he becomes convinced that he is meant to be with Blair and totally ruins her relationship with Yale boyfriend.

Dan writes a dumb poem for a school assignment that's just a random collection of lines from poems he wrote in high school about Serena. S reads the poem after it's inevitably published in the New Yorker. They end up getting together.

In the meantime, Blair gets together with the one and only Chuck Bass. Let me just straight out say that I totally love Chuck Bass. This isn't the old nancy boy Chuck Bass, either. Chuck has spent time at farm college and it changed him for the better. Unfortunately, his monkey succumbed to a snake bite the first day. Now, Chuck is conscientious, sweet, and loving. Blair and Chuck together totally blew my mind and made me make little squeeing noises of excitement.

Then, of course, Nate comes back into the picture. Farm college is only two years, so he has to transfer soon. While touring Brown, he encounters one Jenny Humphrey. She gets Dan to drive him back to the city, but on the way they encounter a snowstorm. So Dan, Nate, Jenny, and Serena (Along for the ride) stop at the Waldorf's summer house for shelter. Unfortunately, the house isn't empty because Blair and Chuck are spending the holidays with her gay dads.

The kids have some intense moments. All three girls are lusting after Nate. There's a scene where they're all going to go up in the attic and "visit" Nate. Blair and Serena actually catch each other on the way, but Little J makes her way up. In the morning, B and S confront each other and cause a little strife in their actual relationships. Blair explains to Chuck how crazy Nate makes her. Chuck understands, and I breathe a sigh of relief because I love them. Dan is pretty much a pissy brat as usual. Nate runs away to his boat (In the words of the great Summer Roberts, girls, you don't cry over bitches on boats) and takes Jenny with him.

So, Jenny and Nate are together and all nauseating and stuff. Blair breaks up with Chuck because the relationship is moving too quickly. I feel as though someone killed my pet unicorn and butchered it in front of me. Serena breaks up with Dan because he is a complete waste of space, or because he is going to Iowa for poetry school and doesn't want her to go, one of those. Vanessa breaks up with her RA because he thinks she was cheating on him and also she wants Dan again. Jenny kicks Nate to the curb because their relationship bores her. In the end, it's Nate, Serena, and Blair at Chuck's New Year's party. It looks like more of the same, but Blair and Serena end up ditching Nate (Yay, finally!) for a trip to Europe together.

I know it seems as though the characters in the Gossip Girl series are shallow, horrible people. Really, they are, but that's actually part of the fun. Gossip Girl is the web stalker who watches over everyone like some sort of Big Brother-guardian angel hybrid. The people are horrible, but they have their redeeming qualities. Serena the vapid blonde who coasts by on her looks actually reads philosophy books for fun. Blair seems kind of fun when she isn't completely insane. My only complaint is that we never got to see who was Gossip Girl. Well, like she said on the show, Gossip Girl is everyone, XOXO.

Gossip Girl: Only in Your Dreams by Cecily von Ziegesar

I'm afraid that my time with the Gossip Girl series has come to an end with the 9th installment of the books. We follow our favorite over-privileged kids to summer break. Jenny Humphrey is in Europe on an art tour with her mom. She will be heading off to boarding school in the Fall. We do not hear any of her exploits in the book, except a GG post that she was spotted dancing on a table, which is neither here nor there.

Blair goes to England in hopes of spending some quality time with Lord Marcus. He is far too preoccupied with his cousin Camilla. Blair gets so fed up that she leaves England and returns home. Unfortunately, after all the money she racks up, including 10,000 pounds for a wedding dress and a pricey ticket to New York, Blair's mother makes her get a job.

Blair gets hired by designer Bailey Winter to do costumes for Breakfast at Fred's, the movie she and Serena auditioned for in the last book. She switches her fantasies from Audrey Hepburn movie star to behind-the-scenes fashionista. Later on, she moves yet again, this time into the Breakfast at Tiffany's apartment with Serena. Blair starts a new romance with downstairs neighbor and lawyer Jason, though she shows signs of missing Nate. We never get to find out what the deal was with Lord Marcus, whether Camilla was his kissing cousin or if he really had a fiancee or secret wife.

Serena is playing the Audrey role in Breakfast at Fred's. She sucks at acting and becomes frustrated that she wasn't instantly perfect at something. After they become roomies, Blair schools Serena in the fine art of Audrey Hepburn. Other than that, Serena lusts after co-star Thaddeus Smith, who is obviously gay.

Nate is doing manual labor on his coach's beach house, which was the only way the school would let him graduate after stealing coach's performance enhancing drugs. He meets a townie named Tawny. They talk, he brings her to the movie's wrap party so that everyone can mention how tacky she looks. Then she goes off to do things with Chuck Bass, things we never want to know. Nate also misses Blair some more.

Vanessa gets kicked out by her rock star sister and moves in with boyfriend Dan. She is doing filmography for Breakfast at Fred's but gets fired on her first day. The director disagreed with her style, namely focusing on ice melting in a glass instead of people talking. Then she gets a job as a nanny for the brothers of Blair's stalker and likely future sister-in-law.

Dan's storyline is my favorite out of all of them because Dan is the worst. He is working at a stupid indie bookstore where the sellers are purposely rude, because they're just that cool. He meets a blonde girl, Bree, who is looking to read Siddhartha, then one thing leads to another and they are doing naked yoga. Naked yoga is not a euphemism, by the way. Dan is hiding his fitness exploits with Bree from Vanessa, while also pretending he does something other than smoke and write awful poetry around Bree. Dan eventually breaks it off with both girls, but his creepy hippy father invites Vanessa to move in, so that situation isn't changing anytime soon.

And, just so I don't have to think up a closing paragraph, here's an example of Dan Humphrey's poetry, which was good enough to be published in the New Yorker:

Pure love. Pure lust. Trust trust.
Buddha was no Jesus.
Neither am I.
I'm just a guy.

Okay, it's not the entire poem. It still sucks, though. Dan Humphrey is, again, the worst .

Gossip Girl: Nothing Can Keep Us Together by Cecily von Ziegesar

In the eighth installment of Gossip Girl, the senior kids are all preparing to graduate from high school. After the shakedown of the last book, Blair and Nate have broken up. Serena and Nate are now together because they want to protect Blair's feelings. If they had just hooked up in the last book, then Blair would be humiliated. Therefore, Serena and Nate pretend to be in a relationship.

Blair actually has a lot on her hands. In the last book, she found out that she made it into Yale right before she discovered S and N together. She decides to move out of Vanessa's apartment and into the Yale Club. There she meets Lord Marcus. I was excited because Lord Marcus was actually in the "Gossip Girl" show and he turned out to be having relations with his stepmother. So we'll see how that turns out.

Other than that, Blair ends up giving the graduation speech as she wanted after Serena drops out of the running. Unfortunately, Serena steals the show some more by landing the lead in a remake of Breakfast at Tiffany's called Breakfast at Fred's. If that wasn't bad enough, she shows up late for graduation in the same Oscar de la Renta suit as Blair and has the nerve to look better than her!

Moving on to my favorite storyline ever, Nate cannot stop crying. Seriously, the boy just cries and cries. He later takes his coach's Viagra and I really wish that was a plot in the television show because it was the stupidest thing ever.

Vanessa started a relationship with Blair's stepbrother Aaron in the last book. Now she is hooking up with both Aaron and ex Dan. It goes like that for a while, then she breaks up with Aaron. Dan takes it as a sign that they are in love forever, so changes his graduation speech to some really dumb stuff about love and taking the road less traveled. Like a true Humphrey, he cannot just say that cliched stuff and he actually defers admission to college, the idiot.

Finally, Little Jenny Humphrey and her very big boobs visit several boarding schools. In the end, she makes some portraits of her family by smearing wine and coffee on a canvas. Surprisingly, she gets into a school with a good arts program. Off she goes to start her own spin-off series.

And, that's how yet another Gossip Girl book went. These books are seriously trashy and I cannot imagine wanting an actual stupid and hormonal teenager to read this stuff. Yet, it's all very addicting. I was going to read the box set I got on clearance and then maybe the last book because I wanted to find out who Gossip Girl actually turned out to be. Alas, I heard that her identity is never revealed, so I will just finish up with #9, Only In Your Dreams and be done with the series.

Cum Laude by Cecily von Ziegesar

(Side note: When I tried to do an image search under "Cum Laude," the search engine warns for adult content, which makes me want to say, "Really?" I think that particular expression is on the banned list, so instead I will say, "Is that affirmative?!?")

College is supposed to be a time of self-discovery. At Dexter College, the school's (original) motto is inveni te ipsum, "Find yourself." We are introduced to a motley crew of five college students as they encounter each other as roommates and on the orientation camping trip. Shipley and Eliza, Tom and Nick are roommates, they end up being grouped together for the trip, they steal a van and wind up at Adam's doorstep.

Shipley is attending Dexter just to upset her parents. Her brother Patrick attended Dexter and subsequently dropped out and dropped off the face of the earth. Shipley is pretty and blonde. Pretty much anyone male is in love with her. She took up smoking and chewing gum just because her parents don't smoke or chew gum. I think she's kind of an idiot and her name is dumb.

Eliza is the counter-culture feminist. She dresses mostly in black and hates Shipley. Poor Eliza throws herself at a guy and can't snag him because he is "saving himself for Shipley." Eliza actually becomes friends with Shipley and I thought their friendship was kind of adorable.

Tom is buff and rich and snobby. Of course, he immediately hooks up with Shipley. Later, he recruits the college's Grateful Dead cover band to take him on a trip into the world of drugs. We're talking a week-long ecstasy bender followed by a night of ether huffing, all so he could paint a deconstructed picture of naked Shipley with a Macy's bag on her head.

Nick is a stoner. He loves Shipley even though she doesn't see him at all. As mentioned, he spurns Eliza because he is holding out for the blonde boy magnet. One wants to quote Heath Ledger (God rest him) in 10 Things I Hate About You: "What is it with this chick? She have beer-flavored nipples?" Nick has this whole zen thing and idolized a nature freak he went to boarding school with, and he builds a yurt (It's a tent-type thing) on the school grounds, partially because of the nature thing and partially so he doesn't have to see Tom and Shipley hooking up.

Finally, Adam got a full scholarship to Dexter but wasn't able to get a dorm. He doesn't participate in the college experience as much as the rest of the group. Adam falls in love with...hmmm, can we guess? Anyways, he thinks that his love is the twuest wuv of all and that she will eventually leave Tom and get with him. Shipley actually always thinks about Adam and getting with Adam and scenarios where Adam and Tom fight over her, and that kind of makes me hate Shipley. If you like Adam so damn much, then break up with Tom and get with Adam! You can't have both, no matter how blonde and pretty you may be.

There are two non-student characters that come into play. First is Adam's adopted sister, Tragedy. Tragedy is apparently the ethnic Jenny Humphrey because every time she is mentioned, so is her tall and well-developed body. I immediately worried that the story would end with Adam and Tragedy getting together, but thankfully that never happened. Tragedy cheers Adam on and livens him up a bit. Her voice even plays in his head trying to get him to loosen up.

Remember Shipley's brother, Patrick? He actually never left Dexter. Patrick is homeless and scrounges for food in dumpsters. When he spots Shipley's Mercedes, which had once been his, Patrick starts to take it out for joy rides. It's easy because their family has a habit of leaving car keys on the right front tire (Who does that?!?). Patrick ends up making friends with Tragedy, who tries to help him whenever she can.

Honestly, when I was reading the big dramatic moment near the ending, I was nearly in tears of sad times. Thinking about it, though, it's actually really funny. It involves a raccoon coat and a shotgun. I thought this book would be Gossip Girl in college. I was getting a little nervous because of all the scandal, sex, and other juicy tidbits. Gossip Girl makes these kids look like a convent. There are minor scandals and several instances of sex, but it's all a bit lackluster. I like more dirt.

Gossip Girl: Nobody Does It Better by Cecily von Ziegesar

Let's call this little bit of trash a palate cleanser. Who am I kidding, though? I love the "Gossip Girl" television show, and not even in the guilty pleasure way that I love "Glee." I'm kind of ashamed to watch "Glee" sometimes, but I love every second of "Gossip Girl." It's trashy, but from my first reading of the book series, I have to say that the book series is far, far worse. Everyone is horrible.

Gossip Girl is a blog that follows the lives of a bunch of high school students. On the show, GG is voiced by Kristen Bell and pretty much says catty/nonsensical things at the commercial breaks. In the books, she has her spottings of the big players and infers that she herself is involved in the world somehow, most likely a student the same age.

In this, the seventh installment of the series, we find the older kids in their senior year of high school. Blair Waldorf, my favorite character on the show and really despite all her bitchiness, the least despicable character in the book, is wait-listed at Yale. Yale is her dream school and she even named her baby sister Yale. Blair and boyfriend Nate have recently started having sex and she moves out to be able to have more sex with Nate. Unfortunately, Nate is too busy getting stoned, hijacking his parents' boat, and playing Oreos checkers for kisses with some French girl, so he and Blair break up again.

Vanessa Abrams, always my least favorite character, is looking for a roommate. She interviews some guy that she falls in love with. He wants to get to know her before committing to anything, and long story short, takes her to this house where artists have been putting on a party for months, a party involving performance art and cutting off fingers. Vanessa was this arty girl with a shaved head who instantly rejected any normal Constance Billard and upper east side stuff, but even she is weirded out.

Dan Humphrey was recruited by the Raves, this really popular band that makes me think of Vampire Weekend. He apparently got very drunk and started singing at Vanessa's 18th birthday, and they loved his horrid poetry. His plot involves shaving his neck, dressing like a little gangster rapper, and screaming, "Crack me like an egg." Oh, and throwing up onstage and getting kicked out of the band in favor of his little sister.

His sister, Jenny, has one...make that two characteristics and they are attached to her chest. Every chapter, pretty much every other paragraph, it's all about Jenny's boobs. So, Jenny is hanging out with the Raves (Underaged! Boobs!) and doing everything she can to disobey her father. Why would she be doing that? Well, Little J wants to go to boarding school to be just like Serena and to do that, she has to misbehave. It's dumb.

Serena VanDerWoodsen pretty much just exists in her immaculate perfection. She is trying to think of a way to tell Blair that she decided to go to Yale for college. (She got into Yale, Stoner Nate got into Yale, but poor straight-A Blair is wait-listed.)

Finally, the awesome Chuck Bass only showed up in a few scenes. He was wearing a jumpsuit and carrying a tote back containing a snow monkey (!) named Sweetie. And apparently, because he didn't get into college, his parents are sending him to military school. Can that actually happen? I really want to know.

The book ends with Blair and Vanessa becoming roomies and actually getting along, Vanessa dating Blair's step-brother, Blair and Nate broken up, Serena and Nate together, and Jenny on her way to boarding school.

It kind of amazed me how the lower class Brooklyn people were kind of worse than the UES people. The Humphreys are just awful people. (And I have never seen a man wear a barrette in my life, but it happened at least twice in this book.) There's brand names and designers flung around all over the place. Still, it was trashy and I liked it. This review was like when I would try to summarize the plots of "Passions," which I would only do in my head or in my online journal, but still, fun.