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| You probably can’t tell, but I stuck these tile stickers to the floor myself. Yeah, really! That’s why it looks so professional. Want me to come do yours? |
“Hillbilly Elegy” by J.D. Vance
Mm, okay. Didn’t actually finish this one. OFF TO A GREAT START. Fun fact, I only realized that this book was A Thing when I stopped reading it to google a picture of the face of the man who was boring me to death. The only reason I bought it is because I thought it was going to be a memoir a la “The Glass Castle” and it is not. It is not so hard. Supposedly what it is is this great explanation about why poor people in the middle of the country voted Trump, and like, first of all, I don’t need an explanation about why ANYONE voted Trump because I’ve had a uterus for almost thirty years now and I have to go outside with it, like, ALL the time. So, okay, my point is not WOE IS ME AND MY VAGINA because you’ve never seen a happier pair of clams than me and my vagina (lol vagina jokes). My point is that if I had known that this book was going to basically be this guy yarning on about “personal responsibility” and how people on welfare shouldn’t buy cell phones while making NARY A PEEP about the shit the richest people in the world buy (WARS), then I would have spent my $12.95 or however much it was on yarn instead. (More yarn, I mean. I was feeling spendy that day.) Next.
“The Practice House” by Laura McNeal
This one I chose because I thought it was going to be about polygamists. (Note to self: Read book descriptions more carefully, and maybe disable Amazon one-click.) However, even though it turned out to only have monogamous Mormons and even though THEY were only in it for like twenty pages – I enjoyed this one a lot. There’s a dusty schoolhouse. There’s betrayal. There’s smooching. Eventually there’s a dirty old man, and juuust enough consumption (nothing worse than too much consumption in a story, am I right?) to make it a satisfying read.
This is definitely one of those books where the characters are the story, if you know what I mean, so if you need a plot where there are A Lot of Things that Happen then you probably won’t love this. BUT. If you like depression-era stories about family dynamics and the complexities of how humans make choices and relate to each other and if you don’t mind a little dust and sadness, then – recommend some books to me, cause me too.
“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
A lot of people read this one in high school, right? Well, I didn’t. Was way, way too busy pretending to read The Iliad and The Inferno. Also plotting elaborate ruses to skip Spanish and math. And gym. Anyway this book was suggested to me by Amazon and since I do everything Amazon tells me to (this post sponsored by Amazon), I bought it. Also because I think it was 99c, and also because, as we’re all well aware, old age has found me morbidly preoccupied with the fate of our poor sweet doomed planet. If you’ve read Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ WHICH YOU SHOULD, the main gist of it is basically like that except it’s set in the future and instead of managing the masses by exhausting them with long hours at shitty jobs, they use literal happy pills. “They” being the invisible others in relative control. And, oh yeah, nobody has moms or dads because everyone gestates in a tube and is conditioned to be happy as a clam (I feel like no one says that anymore, I’m bringing it back) serving whatever function they were cooked up in their little tube to perform. It was fine, whatever.
Next up: “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” by Joy DeGruy, as soon as I finish reading the copy of “Shrill” by Lindy West that my mom sent me. And then one about a family of hoarders. Yes, ANOTHER one.
