I am a guest of the Attic Owl Reading Series:
https://facebook.com/atticowlreadings/…
(scroll down; as of 3.25 Atlantic time, I am second).
Month: July 2020
I feel the following should be put in list format:
- I have read four books by Roberto Bolaño;
- Roberto Bolaño is one of my favourite authors;
- I could not tell you, with any accuracy, anything that occurs in any of the four novels I have read.
Well, that was grim.
And the last Canadian novel I read was grim too.
I thought it would be funny. The blurbs on the front said it would be funny. Maybe it is for those who don’t view their bodies as an insidious enemy, whose goal, as far as they can tell, is type 2 diabetes and heart disease, who didn’t have relatives growing up taking them to task for how big they were, who didn’t, when they lost a bunch of weight in their last year of high school through a combination of not eating and an untreated lung infection, feel that their mothers loved them more now that there was less to love, maybe for people like that, this book was funny.
I am fat. I have a daughter, and with her I use the word fat not as an insult but just as a word, and tell her again and again that size means nothing because good people come in all shapes and sizes, but she is not fat, and secretly (and now now so secretly because here I am typing it aloud) I think her life will be easier because she is thin. I think specific slices of my life would be easier if I lost weight too.
I write grim too. But after the last list of grim novels I’ve been reading, I don’t know whether I can handle any more grim at all.
Otherwise known as a neuro-linguist rewrites The Handmaid’s Tale, which, considering how similar the premises are, is interesting is not mentioned anywhere on the cover blurbs.
I was away last week, which meant more reading time.
Writing time … not so much.
I swear my ninth grade English teacher read us a story by Beth Goobie way back in 1994. I have no proof of this though. Once, years later, I contacted said English teacher about another story she read to us (takes place I think in Poland, on a shetl, and a man lies down on railroad tracks because a girl won’t date him) and she said I was misremembering, that never happened, and she had no memory of reading us that story. So maybe she didn’t read us also a Beth Goobie story. I don’t know. My memory is lost.
https://www.facebook.com/events/909870959499089
Tomorrow (July 18), at 1pm Atlantic, I will be doing a free reading and Q&A session with Live Bait’s New Works Festival.
Hope to e-see you there!
The epub of this and The Rotter’s Club, which I paid $14 for each, were both riddled with OCR errors (double f’s missing especially) and improper page breaking and no section breaks and I love these books and why would you put some of my favourite books in such shoddy packaging? I don’t care if the person to whom I recommended them thought they were trash; they didn’t deserve such treatment by kobo.
I got very little sleep last night. I struggle with my work. I am trying to clean as well. Nothing, however, is done and I am on the verge of exhausted tears.
This is a book I like like swimming in warm water.
I recommended it to someone once. She read it and said it was garbage.
I bought this last year on holiday not realizing it was the sequel to another book I love.