Or perhaps I should say, purchasing from the bad books section?
Jann Arden’s Falling Backwards (see previous blog post here: http://lisabrandt.ca/wordpress/2012/02/22/a-partial-review/ ) didn’t get a lot better. She spent the last quarter of it on stuff that was worth writing about; her career and how it got going. I suppose a superfan would hang onto her every word and love to read detailed stories about her two childhood friends and their terribly ordinary experiences. I suppose. Where are the performing triumphs and disasters, the concert tours, meeting fascinating people or traveling to interesting places? Perhaps they’ll be in her next book but I doubt I’ll take the chance on it.
So I followed it up with a collection of short stories by David Sedaris, whom my friend Erin introduced me to. Sedaris can be wickedly funny but I’ve found his writing to be either right on the mark or so far off his words just hang in the air, bored even with themselves. So I saw his 2010 collection on Kobo called Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk and thought, hey, stories told from the point of view of animals – that’s different! After all, I loved Racing in the Rain, inside the mind of a dog. Interesting, I thought.
Not interesting. It’s incredibly stupid and a waste of $10. The stories are written like children’s books with simple language and little detail but the situations aren’t quirky and amusing as described. They’re unsettling and odd, putting animals into simultaneously human and animal situations. The one about an orphan bear that uses the story of her step-mother’s death to gain sympathy and ends up in a horrible situation is so disturbing I’ll probably never be able to forget it. The whole thing isn’t funny or enlightening or worth your time. And I learned something else: with Kobo, all ebook sales are final!