My twice-annual reminder of how much I would hate to work in retail or otherwise have to touch and account for physical money has ended. Book Fair, always a pleasure (to see you go). My mom came to help, and I may not have survived otherwise. Can I operate a book fair singlehandedly? Yes. Can I do it alone without nearly having an aneurysm and turning into the meanest shrew alive? Not really.
Parents of young children: Please teach them how money works. Pay for things with cash in front of your children sometimes. Also, don't send your child to the book fair with one lousy dollar. You're setting them up for failure and disappointment; it's cruel. You know how many kids cried this week because I had to be the ogre that told them they couldn't buy the [insert hot title here] Pokemon/Dog Man/Manga/Book with the Slime/Book with the Lego man/Book with the Plastic Megalodon Tooth with their $.37? So many kids cried this week!
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I would die of instant satisfaction if David Sedaris immortalized one of my foibles in his writing. This person is ungrateful!
Amanda Knox coming in hot with the practical sleeping tips you pick up in prison. She and Martha Stewart should compare notes.
Say it ain't so! Everything that Wawa touches turns to gold, except for pizza, apparently.
Oh wow, so many parallels between a Spirit Halloween and a book fair.
Analog Reading:
Finished R. Eric Thomas's hilarious book of personal essays, Congratulations, The Best is Over! I think I said that last week, but I can't be bothered to check.
Then I pedaled right on through Jennifer Weiner's The Breakaway. I read a review of it in the New York Times in the past couple months that made it sound slightly more...literary? This was solidly in the rom-com territory and wasn't quite what I was expecting. I picked it up because the premise of a woman in her 30s leading a 2-week bike tour to get away from some personal drama sounded fun, and tt was an enjoyable, entertaining read, but I was unfamiliar with Weiner's writing before this.
There was a lot of telling rather than showing, and some didactic stuff about feminism, body positivity, a woman's right/ability to make choices regarding her life path in general and bodily autonomy specifically. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about those things, but it felt like the author was trying to heavy-handedly persuade someone who might have been on the fence about it all. And despite all that, it still seemed like the main character, Abby, allowed other people to pressure her into cheating on her boyfriend with this lothario on two wheels.
AND, despite the occasional typos and proofreading failures of yours truly, bad copyediting in published works drives me bananas. The author THANKS her copyeditor in the acknowledgements, but I think that copyeditor did her dirty in at least two glaring instances. The protagonist lives in Philly and works part time as a dog walker for a doggy daycare called Pup Jawn, but it seems like Weiner just straight up forgets one time and calls it Dog Jawn, which is just awful. Pup Jawn is corny, but calling it Dog Jawn and not Dawg Jawn is just a missed opportunity. Also, the author once described how Abby got up early and 'road' her bike somewhere. No! Fix that before you send it to the printers, woman! But nobody asked me, did they?
Now I'm reading another memoir about growing up in New Jersey (there is a distinct Northeast theme to the last several books I'm reading) called Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, by Jane Wong. It's about growing up as a Chinese-American immigrant in New Jersey, and having a father with a crippling gambling addiction. Uplifting!
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