Bookshop Bumblings

You got a love a thriller that is so paranoid that the author won’t even let you know who he is.

As time inches closer to the Christmas season I start panicking about reading books which have customer appeal so I will have plenty of new books to recommend to others. Forget about personal tastes or desires to read more literary appealing works. From here on out, it’s all about sentimental tugging at the heart strings reader appeal.

And this one made me cry like a little girl with a skinned knee.

Carrie bought this book while visiting me, and hearing her laughter while she read it convinced me to do the same. Any book where the names are changed in order to “avoid embarrassment, possible legal action-and to prevent the author’s legs being broken by someone in a Yves Saint Laurent suit” is right up my alley. Heaven knows that if I ever right a book that there are certain women who favor turquoise and purple velour jumpsuits who will have my head.

But at least now I know how to order a normal sized beer in Paris. Surely, that’s going to come in handy at some point.

This one makes me want to go to Florence.

And have an affair with a painter for that matter. But for now I’d be happy with just Florence.

This book was pretty good, a phrase here which means not as sharply witty as some of the others but with more substance of story to make up for it.

Plus, it’s orange. You know how I love orange.

As if there would be a book whose subtitle was the motto of my life, and I wouldn’t read it. Although I do have to say that I don’t like it as much as some other subtitles of recent books. Like “Why Do Men Have Nipples: And Other Questions You’d Only Ask Your Doctor After Your Third Martini” and “100 People Screwing Up America: (Al Franken is #37). Seriously, those are sweet.

And this book is pretty neat too. It goes into the decisions which we make intuitively. How we can’t explain why we feel a certain way, and how sometimes knowing the entire situation or having more information on a case isn’t always a good thing when it comes to our decision about it. It cites a lot of interesting studies and stories so it gave for entertaining reading, even if it wasn’t entirely of a heightened academic writing qualiity.

The author of this book is a regular poster on a message board which I frequent. Several months ago we had a discussion about “The Historian” which she was not a fan of. After reading her book, I now see why. Who wants a cryptic unhygenic vampire when you can have a chiseled dashing vamp of your dreams?

Not that Ben has to worry about me or anything. Heaven knows I look awful in a turtleneck.

“You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can’t say that Alabamans as a people are unduly afraid of deep fryers.”

This is almost a male version of the Basic Eight. Not plot wise (so I’m not giving anything away), but in the witty pretentious-but-we-know-so-it’s-not-as-damning clever high school tone. Although it did have plot elements that I kept hoping for in “Prep”. There were your usual sterotypes, but presented in a more humorous way than most. For example on portraying the feminist: “But Takumi doesn’t know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, “You’re not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me!”

And, embarassingly enough, there was one scene which caused me to literally fall out of my chair onto the floor laughing. And that scene is the exact reason that even though I think it’s one of the best teen novels ever – that I won’t be recommending it to a lot of customers.

“This is also the tale of another remarkable vision–not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames’s soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.
“Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.”

The above is the reason why I will never be a book reviewer. Because the only thing I can think of to say about this book is, “It was pretty good. I think I’ll give it to some people for Christmas.”

This is the last time that I pick up a thousand page book to read without thinking of the consequences. Three fourths of the way through I started to feel as if I were in a bad relationship that I just couldn’t end. We had already been through so much I just couldn’t quit! And the endearing memories of our first days together. How I trembled when I read the lines of:

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.”

I didn’t even have the intention of reading the book when I picked it up. I was merely just flipping through, but it grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. Even with that shakiness that I felt when the pacing change near the end, I still think this book is incredible. Really, it is. It went from a hilarious charming view of Indian culture from the view of an outsider who was slowly being made a part of it to a war in Afghanistan against the Russians which threw me for a loop. But it was an informative thrilling loop that caused the story to run a gamut of plot points that many people don’t see in their own lives throughout their lifetime. Or at lease, ones that this particular person hopes she doesn’t have to see in her lifetime. Case in point:

“In my case, it’s a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosspher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun-towers, I became my country’s most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler, and a counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else’s hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.”