“Maybe I don’t have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don’t we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?” We read The Illustrated Man in my seventh grade PACE class, which was like an honor English/Humanities (that I loved — we had the world’s greatest teacher, Mrs. Wood). That was the last time I read it — must have been around 1998 — but I remember the book and the class vividly. The first short […]
Mostly just mommy-shaming
I guess I should have known not to except sunshine and butterflies from a book titled People I Want to Punch in the Throat, but good lord, does this woman bitch a lot. “What is wrong with you? Does everything need to be a competition? Does your kid need to win everything she does? Is winning the only way for her to develop self-worth?” The book starts off great — Jen’s story about how she met her husband (in a chat room in the 1990s) cracked […]
“Adapting to the world when it won’t adapt to you”
“It’s okay with me if you picked up this book because you’re curious about what it’s like to live with dwarfism. But I hope that you’ll take away much more–about adapting to the world when it won’t adapt to you.” That’s exactly why I picked up this book — but like DiDonato hoped, I came away with so much more. Her writing is clear and enjoyable, and she holds no punches when describing her difficult, painful journey through life. Born with diastrophic dysplasia, a rare […]
“Because—dig it—when it comes to death, what can you do but laugh?”
I usually like Stephen King’s short stories, but this collection didn’t quite do it for me. A few of the stories were great, but the rest were more sad than scary, which is not what I’m looking for here. “I’ve made some things for you, Constant Reader; you see them laid out before you in the moonlight. But before you look at the little handcrafted treasures I have for sale, let’s talk about them for a bit, shall we? It won’t take long. Here, sit […]