This past week an overwhelming sigh of relief cast over me as I realized one of the greatest benefits post-college life will offer: I can now read for pleasure.
For the past four years, my weekly Friday night readings consisted of a mountain of required reading books, booklets, textbooks,workshop pieces, research books…you get it. A lot of books that were not my choice. This forced me to read a whole lot of stuff I would never have picked up otherwise, both a good thing and a bad thing. That’s not to say I never had a chance to read for pleasure, but the moments were rare and difficult to come by considering the whole Creative Writing major thing = an English major with some extra writing. Anyways, I arrived at the Jersey shore last week for the Jewish holidays and realized I had nothing to read.
Bad Book:
My sister gave me a book she hadn’t read, but one which she said people loved, and three local book clubs were covering. Three book clubs?! I was willing to give it a chance. I can safely say it was one of the worst books I ever read, making the recently-criticized Little Bee look like a literary masterpiece. The bad book was A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. It was obscenely sexual, to the point where I might call it pornographic, and that would maybe have been okay if the plotline was any good, except it really really wasn’t. I am dying to spoil the ending, but it just doesn’t seem like the moral thing to do. Here’s the gist – The year is 1907 and a rich, lonely man puts an ad in the paper to find a wife. A woman responds saying she is a “reliable, honest woman” and they get married. The woman is far from reliable or honest and she wants to poison him and take him for all he’s worth. It sounds exciting, maybe mysterious, but the twists and turns are so bizarre (again, I really wish I could tell you them here), that I wondered whether the author knew what was going to happen before it was written. Why? Whyyy do people make bestsellers out of terrible books? I need to understand this concept. Help me! And please, help yourself, and STAY AWAY FROM THIS BOOK. Or read it, and let me know what all the fuss is about. It’s an enigma to me.
I’m realizing I did not do a good enough job showing how terrible it was, so I’ll give one spoiler, and just promise me you won’t tell me who won Celebrity Apprentice. The “reliable wife” sleeps with her husband’s estranged bastard child she is secretly planning to live with after the murder. Oh, and she’s a prostitute. And the husband ends up finding out that she’s poisoning him, only he’s fallen so madly in love with her, that he knowingly ingests the arsenic to make her happy. It was more spoilers than I had planned but you really shouldn’t read it!
Good book:
After surviving through the bad book, I scanned through the bookcase for something a bit different. I landed on a section of books by Harlan Coben, a very well-known thriller writer, with a handful of bestsellers, none of which I ever had a chance to read. I chose one at random, and by page 6 I was completely hooked. The difference in measure of entertainment, quality of writing and overall readability was so immense, I was proud to be working in publishing again. The book is called Gone For Good, and you should definitely pick it up if you have never read any Harlan Coben books, or even if you have. I have five pages left, but I can safely say this will not be the last of his books that I read. I’m already a fan. I wonder now, if I would love it as much if it didn’t follow such a terrible book. Hmm…
BEA is tomorrow!!! I hope to bring back lots of good stories.
3 days until graduation! Almost forgot to tell you, just found out that Don Lemon of CNN is speaking! It’s not Alec Baldwin, but I’ll take it! P.S. I heard he was a boring speaker anyway. The master’s graduation is getting Sapphire (as in Push, as in one of the best required readings I had in college, as in the movie Precious with award-winning Gibourney Sidibe, as in why did this have to be the first year Brooklyn College decided to split up the two graduations!?)
Due to BEA and the impending niece nuptials, there won’t be a blog until June 2nd! Time flies when you have a million and one things to do…
Rachel Lily