Sunday, September 24, 2006

things i know for sure: The Lovely Bones:

I am reading this book right now.

It is a terrible book.

But still I am reading it.

I am still reading it so much, that I will not allow myself to read another book until I finish reading this terrible book. Would you like to know how terrible it is? Here is the opening paragraph:

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the seventies, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn't happen.

As soon as I read that opening paragraph, I knew, this is going to be a bad book. But here it is, right now today, and I am on page 351 of this 373 page book, and I can not--though I have considered it many times--just toss it on the street and get the weight of its badness out of my bag. It's preposterous. I pull the book out on the subway filled with shame, because I know there is at least one other person on the subway who has read the book and they probably loved it and I don't want them to think we are in any way in cahoots, and I also know that there is probably at least one person on that subway who has started to read this book and has hated it so much they did what I could not, and put it down. For these reasons I try to adopt a look of neutral disgust while reading this book on the subway.

2:16 AM