A teensy little novel (three bus rides tops) recommended by EW. My friend GirlDetective talked about it here. Creepy and weird and certainly full of the Disquiet of the title. Lots of little details that hit home.

It’s possible you remember me going to my parents’ house for Christmas 2005 and re-reading all my mom’s Cherry Ames books, ’50s novels about a girl who becomes a nurse and inadvertently solves little mysteries. (See the end of the 2005 reading list or the beginning of 2006 or search for Cherry Ames on this page.)

And then I got back to Chicago and went a little crazy on eBay buying up copies for myself. And then I found that the women who wrote Cherry Ames also wrote books about a flight attendant named Vicki Barr.

I don’t find them quite as enthralling as the Cherry Ames series (I say this one book in), but it could be because when I read Cherry Ames I am enthralled with all this childhood nostalgia and that’s just not present reading the Vicki books for the first time. But they’re still fun. Full of totally non-PC sexist garbage that can either make you mad (eh, why bother) or make you laugh (that’s my response), they’re almost pedantic. Were they written to be pseudo instructional books for girls on possible careers? Be a Nurse (in Ames’ case) / Flight Attendant (Barr) and Solve Mysteries! YAY! 🙂 Ha!

Gifted to me by Ginger.

A lot of people in these stories have reached their limit and the story concentrates on them at their last efforts, their last decisive actions. The woman in Sinking House, Zoltan in The Human Fly, Anthony in King Bee. More based in reality (or “our” reality) than say the Greenman stories I read earlier in the month, but that just makes the unexpected even more jolting when it happens.

Really good, I’ll definitely be seeking out more T.C. Boyle.

Alec Waugh = Evelyn’s brother. I read about his books in Slightly Foxed and then sought some out on my most recent trip to Myopic (conveniently located down the block from my haircut so I’m there quite often). This is subtitled “an erotic comedy” and I remember wondering for the first, oh say, 40 pages or so when exactly that was going to kick in. (But it does, no worries. Hee hee.) Apparently (per the book jacket), this is a spoof on “Anonymous Underground Victorian Novels” and I did find it quite silly at times. Silly mingled with a lil “Eyes Wide Shut” wannabe action.

I’ve read more short stories in the past few years than ever before (I mostly blame Elizabeth Crane for that. “Blame” being a good thing in this scenario), and still I thought these were really unusual.

But now that two months have gone by… I can’t pinpoint exactly why that was. I will say that they were all really truly individuals. I’m sure you’ve come across short story collections that as you read through them, the narrators and/or subjects tend to blur together (when they weren’t intended to, although there are collection that intend that) and it seems you’ve just read a novel with some bits that don’t seem to fit together. No question of that happening here. I think my favorite was “Oh Lord Why Not” where everyone has a hit pop song in them.

Pretty short collection though. Big print, small pages. Not a book that takes long to get through.