Different Loving

Different Loving: A Complete Exploration of the World of Sexual Dominance and Submission by Gloria G. Brame, Jon Jacobs, and William D. Brame 

1996

Weight: 1.8 lbs

I collect books.  I am not trying to hoard them and am happy to give them up and rehome them after reading.  It is rare that I will read the same book twice.  There are too many books and, as they say, too little time.  It is a real possibility that I could die before completing my current collection, and THAT keeps me up at night.  It keeps me up and reading anyway.  I am on a mission.  

I remember when it started.  I knew the name of every book and every author I had ever read.  I realized that I was collecting knowledge and that, in a way, I could know at least a little bit about everything.  My adolescent mind did not yet comprehend what it would be like to hold too much information and to not be able to access it all completely.  I did not know what it would feel like to almost know so many things but to not know enough to explain anything.  That is where I am at now, but it is a compulsion and a need at this point.  I must read.  I must surround myself with all the things I hope to know.  I always have a few hard copies nearby, a couple on my Kindle App, all my shelves full, and boxes of books waiting for shelves to become available.  But, if you ask me if I want a book of yours, the answer is always yes.  100 times yes.  The less you are like me and making a recommendation the better.

I love the smell of both, old and new books.  If you bury your face in one, the smell is strong but, before I bring them close, I cannot smell them at all.  I love the feel of a good trade paperback--malleable but strong.  I prefer matte covers to shiny ones.  The shiny ones feel cheap and remind me of self-publishing.  Self publishing can be a wonderful thing, but it is mostly just scary.  It seems like the less money the publisher puts into the book the more of a gamble it will be.  How elitist of me.

I think about the people we have lost and the books they never read.  If they had advanced warning, which ones did they scramble to read before they would never read again?  Sometimes, when you are very sick, reading is one of the only things you can do until you can't.  Will I regret all the time I have spent reading or will I regret that I did not read enough?

I make plans.  If my eyesight gets worse, there is always large print, or you can change the font size on a tablet.  If that is no longer useful, there are audio books.  Is there anything in the world that has not already been written?  It seems like there is an endless resource, an endless combination of words, and some combinations just make my brain crackle and come back to life.  I live for that something new.  I hunt for it constantly.

The Body Parts Shop: Stories

The Body Parts Shop: Stories by Lynda Schor
2005
Weight: 6.6 oz
Method of Disposal: Donating

So...holy shit...I do not think I can put this is the tiny neighborhood lending library with the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Henke's young adult books about dogs, and every day housewive's mystery/romance novels.  I read the first two stories, and I thought, "this person is a genius."  I loved how the stories were arranged.  Fictional facts, real facts, blurbs, one story streaming through it all.  She was blunt, direct, and had some seriously beautiful sentences.  The third story, "Coming of Age," I thought, "what is this all about?  She's losing me, but I still appreciate how different she is from everyone else I have read recently."

As the stories went on the overt obsession with sex, penises, cum, rape, force, and violence actually started to wear on me a lot.  This is highly unusual because I like sex more than the average bear, and I like to be disturbed when reading fiction.  I also find myself writing stories with their own assortment of shocking scenes, but in this collection it just got to be too much.  It started to feel like the art was too reliant on the shock value.  It started to drag on and on. 

There were still moments where I was almost re-captivated, but the stories would always lose me before they ended.  There were stories I thought would be fantastic with a little more editing.  I think Lynda has what it takes, but I think she needs a little more polish.  Or, it was just not my cup of tea and it might be yours.  The title is perfect.  I love the drawings and diagrams.  It was risky.  It was fun.  It was also gross.  It was also sticky, thick, awkward, and sickening like a man ejaculating in your hair when you thought he was aiming for your mouth because he has an obsession with hair--yeah, that is one of the scenes you will find in this book, but the woman finds it exciting.  I am not that woman.

Take the Cannoli

Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World by Sarah Vowell
2001
Weight:7.2 oz
Method of Disposal: Donating

Just finished this book and appreciated all the blasts from the past!  I enjoyed thinking about mixed tapes, people who remember Sinatra and when he died, a world before Bush and Obama.  It was also nice to daydream about being the kind of person who tries all sorts of things and travels all sorts of places writing essays.  I could be Goth for a day.  Could I then write about it and make someone care?  Maybe not but it is nice to dream...

He Began With Eve

He Began With Eve  Joyce Landorf
1983
Weight: 9. 6 oz
Method of Disposal: Leaving about town

It is Mother's Day weekend.  I spent the day with my amazing mother.  We went to an "estate" sale that was not really an estate sale.  Luckily, everyone in the family was very much alive but also very attached to the items they were trying to sell and not inexpensively or decisively I might add.  I cannot begin to recount the awkward times we had there.  We went to dinner and then home to watch a movie.

Tomorrow, I will be doing a bunch of volunteer work for my place of employment and then I will set off to my grandmother's to celebrate her as a mother and also to celebrate the day of her birth.  She is the one that passed on this bizarre book to me.  The back cover of the book and the author can be seen in the picture shown above.  I feel like this should be enough said.  Title, picture, gift from Southern Baptist Grandma.

There was something shocking about this book though.  I was surprised that my grandmother had bought and read a book that was a fictionalized account of the lives of women in the bible.  I don't know why.  She is religious.  She is a woman.  But it  seemed, almost, like a brush with feminism to me.  I know she would recoil, and I know we have differing opinions about the definition of feminism too.  It was also something about it being a FICTIONAL account from the women's perspectives that made it seem just slight subversive to me.  Am I trying too hard?  Yeah...