Ick, No.

I love freesias...not the fake, cloying, Bath and Body Works variant that every single teenaged female wore at some point in high school (Also: Why do all these perfume things wind up being about high school?), but the actual flowers. When I was at AU, my boyfriend at the time sent me freesias once for Valentine's Day and I thought that was just so neat. Not only was it remarkably aware for him, but my dorm room smelled fanTAStic for at least two weeks and they were different...I've come around to liking roses (I used to just not get them at all, and I still think they are lovely but often a complete goddamn ripoff so I feel bad when Speed gets them for me), but getting freesias was just very different and fun, and fed my obsessive and unseemly desire to constantly have things that other people do not have.

So anyway, I love freesias, so I was assuming that Issey Miyake's Eau d'Issey, which has freesia in it, would be great, but...ick, no. This is likely a body chemistry issue but boy does it not smell good on me. Very cloying, very thick, and somehow also too frouffy and overflowery.

In other things that are not as good as I had expected them to be, I finally finished Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, which people have been HARANGUING me about and begging me to read, and it was...fine. To be fair, I'd heard so much hype about Everything that it may never have had a chance, but I just didn't think it was as life changing as it was made out to be. It was a sort of sweet, sad story about relationships of all kinds and the way life doesn't work out the way you think it will (or want it to), but I think some of the gimmickry (jumps in time and narration, etc.) got in the way of the really very good storytelling. Foer has a gift for descripion and figurative language, but I just felt that the book got overly bogged down in vaguely self-absorbed tricks. Disappointing. I don't know that I would advise people to just cross it off the list, but rather to be prepared for the book to fall short of its height.