Old School Southern Rules

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Summer Reading the Second

Hello there!  I’ve been reading.  I told you I would.  It’s all been complicated by Coach though.
He’s all hot and bothered with the new Paleo movement.  If you’re not familiar, it’s a diet turned lifestyle, turned propaganda which preaches living as the cavemen did in order to insure good health.
“I can’t eat potatoes,” says Coach, “cavemen wouldn’t have known to dig in the ground for root vegetables.”
“Yeah,” I said, “well, cavemen wouldn’t have known how to find all 78 ESPN channels with lightning speed either.”
“I’m just saying.  I can’t eat potatoes or peanuts because cavemen would not have known they existed.  And, according to this website, I need to sleep in a cool, dark room with no light, so if you’re going to keep reading until the wee hours of the night, you need to get some blue-blocker glasses so your rhythms aren’t disturbed.”
“Yeah, I’m not going to do that.  And seriously???  You are actually aspiring to live like a caveman?”
“Yep.” he said.
“Well, I’m pretty sure that cavemen spent the better part of football season hunting and gathering, soooooooo…”
And so for now the Paleo movement has been tabled.  We’ll see what happens when the play-offs are over.
Anyway, here are the next books I plan on plowing through.  I’m in a memoir state of mind right now, so I’m starting there, but if you are strictly a fiction gal there are some titles for you too!

Amazon says “Jenny Lawson realized that the most mortifying moments of our lives–the ones we’d like to pretend never happened– are in fact the ones that define us.” 

Considering a bird pooped on my leg, and I got ants in my purse just tonight; this book will probably speak to me.  Yeah, me.  You know, the one who ripped her butt open on a rock in a river and had to get 13 stitches in a rural hospital and then ride in a car for four hours?  The one who previously had a MOUSE in her purse.  A MOUSE.  Mortifying moments are my life.  I think I’ll relate to this one.

Just saying.

It Looked Different on the Model – Laurie Notaro

Oh Sweetie, it always looks different on the model.  ALWAYS.

Notaro is described as the “idiot girl” who makes “misstep after riotous misstep” in her marriage and with her family, and it turns out there’s a chapter about “Ambien Laurie,” who apparently shops in the middle of the night and eats Devil Dogs.  I think she and Ambien Traci, a girl who, much to her own chagrin, finds herself on day 12 of the Insanity workouts (Ambien shopping trip), would get along fabulously.  Turns out I like to shop and eat Oreos in my Ambien-altered state.  Oh yes, I do think there will be much laughter with this one.

And for fiction lovers…

from Amazon: “Set in San Francisco, Three Stages of Amazement takes readers on a spellbinding journey across a landscape of national unease, when the fragility of one marriage reflects the tenuous state of the American Dream. Lena Rusch and her husband, Charlie Pepper, still believe they can have it all—sex, love, marriage, children, career, brilliance. But when life delivers surprises and tests, they must face, for the first time in their lives, real limitation. Told with eloquence and compassion, Three Stages of Amazement is a true thriller of the heart—about confronting adversity, gaining wisdom and finding great love.”
 
Well, I love San Francisco, I think marriage is kind of fun, and who doesn’t love a good story about the American Dream going awry.  (Damn thing tends to do that doesn’t it?)  But, you can ask Coach- I have real issues with limitations.  And authority.  And tobacco products.
 
I don’t really believe in them.  Limitations and authority are fictional characters in my life.
 
This one comes out next week.  I read Good in Bed a year after it was published, and I’ve waited anxiously for every one of her books since.  Jennifer Weiner and I are like soul sisters, except she’s Northern and Jewish.
Did I ever tell you about the time Coach asked our Israeli neighbors who were devout practicing Jews what Santa was bringing them for Christmas?
I tried to smooth things over with a sausage bread roll.
Frankly, I thought the whole unclean meat thing would be a little more lax in the land of smoked pork products.  From what I could tell, they were still pretty serious about it, and according to the youngest child in the family, their father was a soldier who built bombs.
Turns out he was a bariatric surgeon, but he had been an Israeli soldier.  I’m sure his military career was  much more exciting in my mind than it was in actuality.
Sorry for the tangent.  I think this one is about Hollywood and what-not.  Check it out on Amazon.  She could write about chicken breasts and make it interesting, so you really can’t go wrong here.  Well, if you send her a sausage bread roll you might, but otherwise, I think you’re good here.

What Alice Forgot – Liane Moriarty

As a person who cannot remember much of what I did yesterday, I feel I will be able to relate.  Apparently, Alice’s last memory is when she is 29 years old. Then she wakes up in a hospital as a 39-year-old in the middle of a divorce.  Oh, and she has three kids.  As I said, her last memory was when she was a 29-year-old whipper snapper with her whole life in front of her.  The next things she knows she’s lost a decade and finds herself passed out on the floor of a gym.  
 
I can’t tell you how much Alice and I have in common.  It’s like we’re soul-sisters except for the part where “she has to figure out why her sister hardly talks to her, and how is it that she’s become one of those super skinny moms with really expensive clothes.”  
 
Yeah, the super skinny mom with really expensive clothes part isn’t really me.  I’m more of a Rubenesque mom in Mossimo, but other than that?  Me and Alice = kindred spirits. 
 
So, according to Amazon, “Alice must discover whether forgetting is a blessing or a curse, and whether it’s possible to start over…  “I’m crossing my fingers forgetting is a blessing, because I do it ALL the time.
There’s more, but I have to go.  Coach just flashed a document in front of me and said, “Look what I made.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“My pyramid for success.”
Geez…let’s just hope it doesn’t involve foraging for vegetables and wearing blue blocker sunglasses.
See Y’all!

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