Where I Inspire A Love of Spicy Reading

I am a reader. I like to read. I read. So people sometimes ask me to recommend books.

Strangely, whenever I'm asked for recommendations I glaze over as though I've just smoked about 4,000 bong hits and been asked to solve difficult mathematical equations. Huh? Wha? B-b-b-ft?

So on Saturday when I was reading the GGC website and found her link to Library Thing I got all excited. Library Thing lets me (or you or anyone) catalog books in one place. I immediately started cataloging my favorite books there. Now I have something new to meticulously obsess about and I can add favorites as I remember them at 2:41 a.m. anytime I want.

Also, when I'm busy smoking weed*, I can refer the unbelievably long line of people* wanting my personal reading list recommendations* here.

(***I am so full of shit, myself, malarky.)

You might be thinking, "Who gives a flying fu squirrel what books are Jessica's favorites?" If so, I say to you: "Suck my hairy big toe." "Your Mama!" "Bless your heart."

I can tell you... I did not like The Poisonwood Bible. You may be gasping with SHOCK over this revelation, but I didn't like it. I didn't HATE it, I just thought it was heavy handed. I like Barbara Kingsolver and have read all of her other books and liked them. There were great things about The Poisonwood Bible -- like the scene with the ants-- but overall I felt I would have drawn the same political conclusions about the U.S. and the Congo without having Kingsolver press down so hard on my political consciousness. As The Mayor says, "OUCH, gil-offa me."

Similarly, you won't find The Kite Runner in my list of book recommendations because of both the sensational use of butt rape and the all too convenient re-entry of the butt raping bully later in the story threatening yet another youth conveniently connected to the first.

Give me a sensationalist butt raping, Kite Running break already.

Dear Mr. Hosseini:

If you MUST use butt rape in any future novels that you may choose to write, you should know that fictional butt rape is like saffron, not Lawry's Season Salt. You get me?

Take it easy,

Jessica

While we're on the subject of sensational butt rape in fiction, can we go ALL THE WAY BACK to The Prince of Tides and just say: "Mr. Pat Conroy why you had to go and muck up a perfectly fine book with that hilarious funeral home scene with a sensationalist, I'm gonna get me some serious book sales butt rape scene followed by the completely over-the-top and stupid tiger at the gas station scene I will never know, but I threw your best selling piece of contrived butt rape crap across the room."

I tend to go for writers who work hard to illustrate all that is compelling and extraordinary in the ordinary human experience. Wallace Stegner is a God.