Recently Read

As usual, skip it if you wanna.

1. Long Past Stopping by Oran Canfield – Memoir of a ex-junkie, detailing his efforts to get clean. He found himself fascinating, but I didn’t. He was also kind of hung up on the misdeeds of his dad, the creator of those abominable “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books. News flash, kiddo: Lots of people had sucky dads. Get over it.

2. Saving Cicadas by Nicole Seitz – Novel about a family road trip told from the point of view of a young girl. Simplistic and childishly written. I mean, granted, if you’re writing from a kid’s viewpoint, you’ve gotta dumb it down some, but other writers have handled this angle a lot better. I didn’t finish it.

3. It Takes A Village Idiot by Jim Mullen – About a guy who moves from NYC to the Catskills. It was just too … snarky. Normally I’m a fan of snark, but this dude’s humor was just grating. He had the attitude of, “I can portray these innocent, hard-working people as total dipshits as long as I portray myself as a dipshit, too,” which … no. I wonder how many of his neighbors are still speaking to him.

4. Movie review time! “Pressure Cooker” is a doc about inner-city high school students preparing for a culinary scholarship contest. Interesting.

5. The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen – Novel about a girl who thinks she can perform miracles – Interesting.

6. Dewey, the Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World and Apparently Went For The Guinness World’s Record for Longest Book Title by Vicki Myron. You DO know how any book about a cat ends, right? Yeah. Oh, and in an effort to pad out the life story of a CAT into a full length book, the author also included her own life story, which, well, if you can’t say anything nice and all that so I’ll stop now.

7. A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz – Novel about … hell, I don’t know. I got about thirty pages in when I realized I still had no idea who any of these characters were, and when one of them supposedly fed day-old kittens “canned cat food by spoon” I gave up. Christ.

So! Anybody read anything good lately? 'Cause it's been pretty slim pickins for me lately.