Bookshop Bumblings

A Warning: This is probably not the best book to read if you’re 29 or have just turned 30. Seriously.

“If there was such a thing as reincarnation, and she did come back, she just hoped to God she wouldn’t wind up in a third world country, where she couldn’t get fresh produce, or have access to good skin products, because if she couldn’t get her Merle Normal cold cream, she would just rather not come back at all.”

One of the best memoirs I’ve read this year. It made me want to become a barfly in Long Island.

Any book which makes me want to be ANYTHING in Long Island is a miracle worker. Although, I did once get felt up by a girl in LI so maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh to judge it.

They should have entitled this one, “The Suck.”

And I was so looking forward to it as well. So excited that when I bought my copy I was jumping up and down while clapping. Plus, I was EXPECTING a bad ending. I just thought it would be bad as far as the poor orphans, not bad as in the writing and lack of the usual wit.

I don’t even have the heart to tell others as I sell it to them at the store. It is the end of the series and people are going to read it no matter what I say so I just try to keep from looking miserable.

Book 1 of 2 in a series entitled: “A customer at the store lent me this book without me asking for it, and I’m trying to read it and return it as soon as possible so that I do not do any damage to it and ruin my reputation with them forever.”

I read this new bestseller written by the author of a former Oprah Bookclub pick, because a lady at the gym told me it was good.

Why don’t I just shoot myself now?

This shoving books in by the fist fulls so that I will have things to recommend and discuss with customers during the rush of Christmas season (when I will have no time to read anything) is getting me down. To be honest, it always does. But then the season comes around and I will pine for the days when I was able to read so much, no matter what it was.

This one was a retelling and remaking of Cinderella. I hate to admit it, but I missed the singing mice.

How thick am I that it took me three-fourths of the book to realize this was a retelling of Snow White? I mean if the title “Fairest” didn’t clue me in, there was really no hope.

Le sigh.

PS – Levine does a MUCH better job than Sir Maquire did, that’s for sure.

A picture of Hunter S. Thompson as a young chiseled man graces the front cover of this paperback, and all I have to say is, “Nice shorts.” Seriously, can we say ‘Richard Simmons’?

In the course of the several hours it took me to wait for my doctor’s appointment, I was able to read this from start to finish. I had borrowed this one from Ben, and it was a nice light distraction. It kind of petered out near the end, but the beginning scene where the narrator pens an old grumpy man to a window with a typewriter because he’s .. well old and grumpy. That right there was enough to make the book for me. If I could have used tactics like that on my last family vacation to Florida, I might have actually enjoyed the trip!

After seeing this one on countless bestseller and bookclub of the month lists, I decided to try it out knowing that such a touted memoir must be one which firmly knotted the old heart-strings.

Walls was the second oldest of her four siblings born to a college educated mother who was hellbent to never use her teaching degree as she was an Artiste and an alcoholic big-idea father. I did not think that any parents would frustrate me more than the mother in the novel, Towelhead (see Book #36) but oh how wrong I was. The children basically starved and lived in incredibly destitue dire circumstances (no electricity, no indoor plumbing, huge holes in the roof over where they slept, little to no food, no medical treatment on serious injuries, having their money stolen by their own parents, being molested by countless people including their own grandmother and uncle, having their father send them up with a man who he knew was going to make sexual advances on his young daughter, etc.) All by an educated couple who if they had put their own selfishness aside would have been able to support their children. In fact, the mother owned land worth over a million dollars which she refused to sell or even live on. Instead, her children starved.

It’s an intriguing memoir to read mostly because the way it is told. There’s no self pity or whining. It’s just laid out there. Of course, what was really sad was that I realized that I grew up with many children who were in same financial cirucumstances as I also grew up in the very rural Appalachian mountains. Unfortunately, I was about as thoughtless as the Walls classmates when it came to their struggle. That’s where the pain really hit for me.