Look Me in the Eye, Running with Scissors, The Case of the Angry Mourner, and The Case of the Gilded Lily

Now that school is nearly done, I have so much more time to read! Yeah!
First up, on Friday I finished John Elder Robison's memoir, "Look Me in the Eye". Robison grew up in an extremely dysfunctional household and wasn't diagnosed with Asperger's (a milder form of Autism) until he was in his 40s. This memoir was a great peek into the mind of someone with Asperger's, how he thinks and processes things. He is very happy and successful: happily married, with a teenage son and his own business restoring classic luxury cars. The coolest thing of all: he spent years with the rock band KISS, designing Ace's guitars. How cool is that?
So after reading that, on Saturday I had to read his younger brother, Augusten Burrough's memoir, "Running with Scissors". Augusten was born Christopher, but changed his name at 18. While John ran off and escaped from home before their parents got too insane, poor Augusten was stuck with them, and boy were they lunatics. After his parents divorced, his mother sent him to live with her even crazier psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, and his household where there were no rules, no boundaries, and everything went, including child rape. It was a very hard book to read, because he was trying to convey the hilarity of the situations, and if it had been fiction, like McMurtry's "Texasville" or something, then it would have been hilarious. But remembering that it's true, all this stuff really did happen to this poor screwed up kid...well, it was just hard to laugh at it then. It was good, though, very well written, and I enjoyed it.
I got two Perry Mason mysteries by Erle Stanley Gardner at my new favorite library that I actually hadn't read yet! It's been so long since I read any Mason books that they all sounded familiar to me, so I took a shot and grabbed two. The one I read yesterday was "The Case of the Angry Mourner", which has Perry on vacation at Bear Mountain when a wealthy young playboy with a bad reputation for being a wolf with women (these are set in the '40s and '50s, keep in mind) is found dead, shot, and of course the young lady he was dining with that evening is the logical suspect, only all the clues lead to her mother, Perry's client. Since Perry's clients are never, ever guilty, you knew right off it wasn't her.
Today's was "The Case of the Gilded Lily". A wealthy (lots of wealthy people in these books--I guess they're more interesting than poor people) businessman is threatened when a blackmailer comes to him with incriminating evidence against his lovely new and much younger socialite wife. The businessman gets drugged during the payoff and wakes up in a motel room with a dead body. Never a good thing. And it wasn't the new wife, either! I love Gardner's red herrings, they're all over the place.