What an imagination this author has!!! I think out of all the books I’ve read for this project, this one has the most vibrant and interesting characters. Some parts kind of read like something you’d read in the newspaper, but mostly the author constructs a world out of a small town named Savannah that has cementries as parks and a vibrant homosexual community. I don’t want to give away the ending, but there’s a murder trial that just lasts forever and in the end the person finally gets acquitted. I would really like to visit Georgia now, and eat peaches while sitting on a tombstone bench just like in this story.
    The man accused of murder throws really “fabulous” parties. It got me thinking about whether I would go to someone’s house who was accused of murder just for a party. I mean, I do love special parties as much as the next person who also loves special parties, but it doesn’t feel right to go to a party thrown by a maybe murderer. Especially around Christmas! But then again maybe that’s the only time to go to a party thrown by a maybe murderer. But then again, how special can a party be anyway. I mean, the most special parties have good-looking people dressed up nice who are telling great stories while everyone eats mini lobster rolls. That’s pretty much the height of the valley right there. Back in the day, a great party beginned and ended with orgies but I’m too old now for a room full of naked people to be interesting, or even pleasant. I guess the only way to beat it would be to serve jumbo! lobster rolls. Someone should do that. Maybe me.   
Sweet Regards,
Glo    

I recently received CENSORING AN IRANIAN LOVE STORY by SHAHRIAR MANDANIPOUR in the mail. Well, it wasn’t addressed to me, it was addressed to Dusty. Someone named Suze sent it to him, I’m assuming one of his former students, since inside there is a note that says, “You taught me how to love books and so much more…Remembering. Yours truly, Suze.” I remember alot of times when Dusty’s former students would run into him around town and talk about how he was their favorite teacher, so I didn’t find the gift too unusual. But I’m surprised Suze doesn’t know he’s dead! I hate having to write those notes informing people of his passing, although it happens less and less everyday. I got pretty blue when I got this package, and felt rather strange in general, like the air and the house were a bit too silent on purpose. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the book I’m about to tell you about.
    This book takes place in Iran. It’s about an author trying to publish a love story about the couple Sara and Dara, but many of the passages get censored by the Iranian government, so the story becomes very difficult to write for the author. I always had the impression that the Iranian government was evil and would destroy the world with a nuclear bomb if they could, but this book portrays the government as a bunch of busy bodies. Evilness and busy bodiness leads to a pretty bad situation. The poor author couldn’t write one sentence freely and I can’t imagine how annoying that must be.    

       The main censoring person in the book is Mr. Petrovich, and I often thought of him as one of those senator types who preach about family values and homophobia stuff, but then you find him in some national park rest stop with his pants down to his ankles holding a firecracker and no lady in sight. As Shakepeare wrote, “Thou shalt protest too much.”   

       My suspisions were found correct when at the end of the story Petrovich had fallen in love with Sara. I found this a little weird since Sara doesn’t exist. Some parts of the story were confusing to me. I didn’t get the fuss regarding the midget. Maybe midgets have a special place in Iranian culture that I don’t know about. Are they like crows in American stories? Or chimneys in British ones?
    Even though I was confused a lot, I really like this story. I felt really bad for the author and was glad he finally was able to publish the book (although I don’t know why he left in the parts that were crossed out. Either delete it or leave it in! I felt silly trying to read words that had a strikethrough through them). I learned alot about Iran and Iranians, like how much protesting they do, how sneaky they need to be, and how recently their freedoms were taken away. At one point the author writes “Many of us Iranians are terribly angered when someone teaches us something we don’t know.” Boy do I know a lot of people like that! Mostly Dusty’s brother Herc. He turned camaro-red when I told him that it was a man’s genes that determined the sex of a child, not a woman’s. He didn’t like learning that he was the one responsible for three daughters. I can write that about him because he doesn’t read the world wide web.
Sweet Regards,
Glo
   

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain doesn’t have a single postman in it, or even any mail. It’s about a man who meets and falls in love with a woman, tries to kill her husband, then really kills her husband, then kills her by accident, then gets sentenced to death. The book was pretty short so maybe there was a subplot about a postman discovering the murder or being a long-lost lover and it got cut out. It would explain the title at least.
    The book was engaging and I read it rather quickly. I didn’t quite understand why the main character (I forget his name and the book is all the way out in the shed and I don’t feel like putting on my sturdy slippers to go get it, and there’s no way I’m going out there barefoot because the geese have been a big problem ever since Mr. Woofy hurt his leg and is inside all day, so I’ll just say the character’s name is Phil), Phil and the lady, let’s say Jill, liked each other so much. Jill says she married her husband, Bill, because she wanted to get out of the hash house (whatever that is, a prince’s harem maybe?) but is not in love with Bill. So Jill and Phil spend alot of time sneaking around behind Bill’s back and declare their love for each other. But it never seemed like they were in love, more like lust to tell you the truth. Kind of like that Jerry Maguire movie where Tom Cruise gets Renee Zelwigger just by greeting her. They never really talked to each other about anything deep. To be fair, some people don’t have any deepness to them. For example, my old neighbor Joe seemed quite undeep and I often wondered how he experienced love or if he could feel love at all.
    By the end of the book I ended up feeling pretty bad for Phil even though he killed Jill and Bill. He seemed to feel pretty bad about it too.
Sweet Regards,
Glo

THE GREAT GATSBY BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD is about a guy whose friends and neighbors are swinging couples in the 70s. His main neighbor, Gatsby, throws a bunch of parties hoping that a lady named Daisy (my daughter’s name!) would attend. Gatsby has been pining for Daisy for five whole years and it never occurred to him to find someone else. Daisy ends up fooling around with him while Tom, her husband, is fooling around with someone else, who ends up in a hit and run with Daisy. Before this they all hang out together and wonder why they aren’t having a good time! I swear most of the people written about in these books are not too swift. Although I shouldn’t be too hard on them because my neighbors engaged in some swinging too back then. Of course no one died like the characters in this story. Instead one of the husbands and one of the wives ran off together, leaving their respective spouses, Joe and Jill, behind. Joe and Jill tried to make a go of it too, but it turns out that they didn’t like each other very much if there wasn’t any cuckolding going on. Jill ended up moving to New Hampshire with another woman and Joe stuck around and eventually opened a vacuum repair shop. He met a lot of ladies that way. He even hit on me one time back when Dusty had taken a sabbatical to Lake Placid. He said that both people in a couple need to have their extracurricular fun so no one has an excuse to get jealous. Well I wasn’t about to take advice from a divorced vacuum repairman. Anyway I was having plenty of fun tracking a family of Red-throated Loons.
Sweet Regards,
Glo

THE AWAKENING by KATE CHOPIN. THE AWAKENING by KATE CHOPIN is about a lady Edna Pontellier who is rather bored with life and has an affair while her husband is away. Wow! I just realized that’s what FEAR OF FLYING is about! Unlike that book though, Edna has a cook and a servant and someone to watch her children, which leaves her absolutely nothing to do. To make matters worse, she is expected to do nothing except social things. Yesterday I had to clean the shed, crawl through crawl space, and express Mister Woofy’s anal gland, so I was feeling rather jealous of Edna’s situation. By the time I went to bed I was achy but tired and satisfied and I just don’t know how you would even fall asleep if you spent your day dillying and dallying. So while I was washing up for the night I was happy I was not Edna and that I didn’t have to change my dress five times a day for sport.
    Edna tries to change her situation and I rather liked that she took up a different house and tried to paint and such. Her friend says something to her which I really liked, that to be an artist you must have defiance. My daughter Daisy always wanted to be an artist. She’s taken up pastry decorating and writing about music in the past but nothing seemed to stick, and I always suspected it was because her temperment was too soft. I’ve dabbled in watercolors myself. My favorite thing to watercolor was Mister Woofy’s ancestor. Madame Woofy was her name, but you had to say it  Madaaaaaaaaaaaaame Woofy. She was pretty dignified for a beagle/bulldog mix with a chopped-off tail (we didn’t intentionally chop it off, she just whacked it against the side of the coffee table too many times. I guess the coffee table’s edges were pretty sharp though. I made the table myself and never got around to sanding it properly. I’d do it now except one time Dusty had too much moonshine his brother brought him and they were wrestling over the last of a peanut butter cup because lord knows one should not try to separate a man from his chocolate peanut butter candies, and Herc won the match when Dusty tripped right onto the table, breaking it down the middle. Dusty hadn’t wrestled with anyone since he was a teenager, and Herc hadn’t wrestled with anyone since only a week before so the fight didn’t last long enough for me to break it up and save my table, or the peanut butter cup it turned out). Madame Woofy died in a river.
    This story took place in Louisianna. I’ve never been to Louisianna. Dusty used to say it was the perfect place to abandon all your notions. I always wanted to go to New Orleans, but maybe not anymore. This story sure made Louisianna sound pretty, but also hot. It took place before air conditioning so maybe it’s not so bad now. Kate Chopin made the heat sound romantic, with fans and hammocks and veils, but then you remember that the veils are to keep away pesty mosquitoes and it doesn’t sound so appetizing. Maybe I’ll visit Vermont instead.
Sweet Regards,
Glo

Boy am I scared of flying. I’ve only flown three times, but all times were traumatic. The first time I saw my very stern, very quiet, and very proud uncle throw up during the take-off and landing. Some of his upheaval landed in a distinguished woman’s hair. It caused the stewardess to get sick herself. It was very embarrassing for everyone. At that age, I had never even imagined it possible for a grown man to become helpless like that, and that was scarier than the flying. The second time I flew was to Tennessee. We were going to Pigeon Forge to play some mini golf and visit my husband’s untamed family, in that order. The pilot sounded drunk over the loudspeaker. Of course, he may just have had a lisp and a need to tell priest jokes.
    The third time I flew, a woman on board was in the process of scream-therapy treatment, or so she said. Every few minutes she would go into the bathroom and frighten everyone with loud aggressive obscenities that seemed to be directed at a man accompanying her. A lot of “Shove your you-know-whats up your you-know-wheres,” and “AAAAAAAAAHH I’m gonna f-word your a-word hole with a d-word corpse.” I’m no church-goer who tip-toes on velvet rugs through life, but this was a bit much for my ears and made me on edge throughout the entire plane ride.  

     Thinking back, I wonder if the man who was with her was her therapist. Which brings me to the book I am reviewing today, FEAR OF FLYING by ERICA JONG. This story is about a lady (who is NOT Chinese) who has had failed relationships and a successful book and feels out of sorts and leaves her husband to gallavant around Europe with a poor, in the money sense, brutish married therapist who insults her and leaves her in the end. She spends the whole book thinking about herself and trying to come up with a diagnosis for her out-of-sortsness. If you want my non-medical opinion, what seems to be ailing her is nothing else than the sickness of being twenty-four years old. Thankfully the treatment is within reach. All she needs to do is get older. Viola! Problem solved by virtue of being replaced with other, more earthly problems, like hernias, cigarette taxes, and dead spouses who leave behind a room full of books but no answers.
Sweet Regards,
Glo

I’ve heard of this book before so when I found it in Dusty’s library I was pretty excited. But boy was it depressing! Holden Caulfield, the main character, is a sixteen-year-old boy who just can’t get it together. He gets depressed over everything, including Vicks nose drops, headmasters, quiet streets, quiet hallways, new ice skates, Hollywood, movies, comb overs, the first show of the morning at Radio City Music Hall, hotel lobbies, good piano players, people clapping for a good piano player, stolen gloves, a prostitute taking off her dress, a prostitute, cheap luggage, someone eating toast at breakfast when he’s eating eggs, wet benches, girls who marry dopey guys, alumni, sleeping in the bus station, and someone saying “please.” I generally liked the story, although I also worried that he would get in trouble in NYC. He’s just a kid and a lot of terrible things happen in cities, and I imagine it was even worse back then. But the worst thing that happened to him was getting roughed up by a bellhop pimp and he seemed to recover a-ok.
      I have a brother William (I used to call him Willy but he hates that now) and Dusty used to call him Holden sometimes. I never knew where that came from til now. I can see why though, because William doesn’t like something about every  person he meets, or anything else, really.  He hates Christmas because the smell of pine reminds him of being lost in the woods (even though he’s never been lost in the woods), he hates pistachio ice cream because it reminds him of pond scum, and he isn’t at all impressed with Barack Obama because he’s never seen him do a dangerous stunt like motorcycling over a bunch of cars or walking a tight rope. William can be hard to talk to.
    This book also reminded me how teenagers’ habits are quite unsanitary and gross, and I’m happy I’ll never have to live with one again. I don’t miss having to pick up used bandaids off the floor.
Sweet Regards,
Glo

Boy did I like this book better than ON THE ROAD. This book isn’t a novel, its short stories. Most short stories are pretty boring but I like the ones in this book because stuff happens in them. An entire family gets murdered in the first one! I was sad when that happened but at least it happened. I’m not a religious person so at first I thought the religious references were going to put me off but in the end I wasn’t bothered by it at all. A lot of the religious people were hypocritical which sounds about right. FLANNERY O’CONNOR is a really good writer though he isn’t so good at writing titles. A lot of the titles were the opposite of what happened in the story. For example GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE was about mediocre and bad country people. A STROKE OF GOOD FORTUNE was about bad fortune (normally getting pregnant is good but this lady didn’t want to be pregnant. Also I figured out she was pregnant within the first half of the story so I didn’t bother reading the rest). THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN is about a guy abandoning a deaf girl he was supposed to marry so I don’t see how anyone’s life was saved. A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND, the story this book is named after, I guess was accurate in that the family didn’t find a good man but the title doesn’t quite convey that they found a group of very bad men. A LATE ENCOUNTER WITH THE ENEMY just didn’t make sense. THE RIVER is about a kid that is forced to get baptized in a river so that fit.
    Besides the wrong titles, the stories were very good. My favorite was A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST, maybe because the young child in the story reminded me of Daisy when she was very young, and the teenage girls in the story reminded me of Daisy when she was a teenager. You know, smart-alecky, wise tomboy to frivolous, silly teenager. Now she lives by herself in a closet in NYC and acts carefree but I know better.
    I was curious though by the events that took place at the carnival. We never had a freakshow at the carnivals that came through our town. The people that work the carnivals are queer enough, don’t you think? I’ve never seen a hermanfrodite before, although I guess I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing one, though I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to take a gander. The natural question would be if hermanfrodites have sex with themselves, but I think I would be more curious about if their lovers have sex with both parts. That’s not something you’d actually ask a person even if you knew they were a hermanfrodite, because it would be very awkward. It’ll just be one of the many mysteries in my world, like what dogs dream about and what the moon smells like.
    There is also a story in this book called THE ARTIFICIAL NIGGER (I don’t ever use that word but that is the name of the story so I have to write it out). This story is about some very small people going to Atlanta and seeing Black people for the first time. I had a hard time believing that a fifteen year old boy is only 68 pounds, but since so much of racism comes from insecurity I guess this made sense for the story.
    I hope the next book I read is as good as this one.
Sweet Regards,
Glo

I think everyone in this book is a jerk. I fail to see what is so impressive about being a jerk to everyone, but the people in this book seem sort of proud. The narrator, Sal, likes to travel across the country with some looney toon named Dean he looks up to. Dean’s got a Chinese fire drill going on in his head. He’s always excited to see Sal and to talk. That is the entire plot of the book. Traveling around the country just to have a conversation. I know for a fact there were phones back then. Sal and Dean never really work and and are always mooching money off people. Moochers are shameful, and they should go back to Europe.
    At one point Dean hit one of his girlfriends and I just about gave up on finding any nice qualities in these people, which isn’t like me at all. I usually think everyone has at least one nice quality. But I kept reading anyway in the hope that they would learn a lesson, or maybe crash their car and have to stay in a hospital for a long time. I chose this book from the shelf because it had some cool-looking men on it who reminded me of my brother. I guess I judged the book by the cover incorrectly ha ha ha! I remember Dusty my husband telling Daisy my daughter that this book was the definition of a generation and that makes me depressed. Dusty was sweet but sometimes had a strange outlook on the world. Its hard not to be disappointed in his thoughts about this book but he must have some other knowledge about the book that I don’t have. Or else why would he say that? I always suspected that professor’s analysis of stuff was really just smart-sounding excuses. All this to say that I really hated this book. Hopefully the next book will be better.
Sweet Regards,
Glo

So the first book I chose to read was ANIMAL FARM by a man named GEORGE ORWELL. It had a pig on the cover and I like to eat pigs so I figured that was as good of a reason as any other reason may be good. The subtitle said it was a “FAIRY STORY” which I thought was the historical way to say fairytale. I never was much of a fairytale fan when I was younger but my daughter Daisy was a big fan when she was little. She in particularly liked one about a princess with long blond hair who was trapped in the Tower of Pizza waiting for a handsome prince. Or maybe it was a knight. Well she was waiting for a handsome man of some importance to arrive. He finally came on a horse and climbed up her hair and picked her up and somehow climbed down her hair while holding her. Now that I think about it, it doesn’t make much sense.
    I thought this book was going to be about something else, something more like the story of the princess in the Tower of Pizza. But ANIMAL FARM isn’t a fairytale where two people love each other again. I’m not sure anyone in the book loved each other.
    For those who haven’t read it, its about a bunch of animals on a farm who don’t like the boss anymore. Everyone can relate to this! The animals go to war with him and chase him off the farm. Then they form a commune and things are honky dorey until the pigs want to be the bosses. This may be a representation about police cops. They end up building an army of sheep, which may be a representation of Catholics. The pigs become the boss.
    I did think the whole book was a little silly maybe because I had a hard time imagining pigs thinking and talking with other animals. How did all the animals know the same language? That is very unrealistic. I did like the horse Boxer and was sad that he got sent to the glue factory. I tried to take comfort in the fact that he had a full and productive life that he seemed to have enjoyed.
    I’m not sure what Dusty’s thoughts are about this book. I don’t remember him ever mentioning the name GEORGE ORWELL. I remember him liking old books by Mark Twain and some British sisters. I also remember him talking about a book called ADDA and how he never gets a chance to finish it and would always have to start over. Maybe I will finish it for him someday. I can’t wait to read all these books.
Sweet Regards,
Glo