I Love Everybody (If everybody is my dog)

It was a very busy weekend at our house. Saturday the dear fiance and I adopted a puppy from our local shelter!

Meet Massey!

She's a ten month old (according to the vet) Lab puppy. She was given to the shelter by her first family because they just couldn't deal with her puppy behaviors (chewing, housebreaking issues etc.). We didn't take this decision lightly, I've been begging the fiance for several years for a dog. When we finally bought our house in January I was totally ready to head straight to the shelter and pick out a dog, he stepped in and said we had to wait until summer so I would be home all the time to work with the dog. In mid April my parents had to make the tough decision to put down our 12 year old chocolate lab and my jonesing for a dog increased exponentially. We went on Saturday and looked at several dogs and ultimately decided on her because she seemed calm and happy. She is, at least partially, she is totally calm if both of us are sitting in the room with her. Her sole goal in life is to be with her people and she isn't particularly happy if we aren't all together. There is nothing more she loves than cuddling with me or sleeping at my feet (of course the second I move she's all over the place). She also throws up in the car and likes to run wild in the yard and chase birds and bugs. She also hasn't quite yet mastered the "come" command (as evidenced by her taking off into our wheat field today and refusing to return), but she's great at sitting down!

This is a lot of backstory for a blog about books, but I honestly cannot stop gushing about my sweet little girl. It's fun to see her personality develop so quickly and to see how different she is from other dogs. I have known. However, she requires a lot of attention and work and for that exact reason I've read a grand total of two pages this weekend. Getting a new puppy is a lot like having a baby (not that I've every actually had a baby but the concept seems similar) and I wasn't too interested in my book (even though it is an awesome book). Turns out even for an avid reader when you have something as cute as a new puppy book reading tends to go by the wayside.

However, I did finish Laurie Notaro's book and without further ado here is my short and brief review.

I've admitted to a fondness for Laurie Notaro so it's not a surprise that I adored "I Love Everybody and Other Atrocious Lies". Laurie is like a meaner (and slightly stupider...in a good way) version of myself. Her writing verbalizes my internal monologue. I especially connected with her struggles to get her book published and the struggle when yet another rejection letter arrived in the mail.

She says "Each said I sucked. Each said I was 'not right for their needs.' Each wished me 'good luck
 in my pursuit to get my book published. And they meant it, the same way my mom meant it when I told her I had finally found a boy that liked me back" (61). When I read those sentences and the continuing rant about how all she would have to do to get her book published is become Anne Heche or Oprah Winfrey and I connected. The best thing a book can do for me (or any reader) is to make a connection with the reader. It's a tough thing to do, especially in the memoir genre when the author is sharing specific stories about their own life. I've read a lot of memoirs that I just can't connect to, it's almost becoming an overdone genre with entirely too many people telling stories that to be honest aren't that interesting (Living Oprah comes to mind). It's a tough balance to strike, you have to be honest yet it is difficult to make the mundane funny and exciting. Notaro strikes that balance with ease, she's able to take the smallest most mundane events that every person has experienced (shopping at Costco, going to the movies and helping the elderly with their electronics) and turn them into something epic.

When I read her book I feel like I can look at my most mundane activities and find the humor in them all. It's a gift really to look at shopping at Costco (sub in Sam's Club for me, we're too much of a cow town to get the fabulous Costco) and write several whole pages about it (To be fair I can write several pages about shopping at Target-but absolutely no one wants to actually read them) and make me laugh out loud. I'm sure if I could get my dear fiance to read it he would identify with Laurie's long suffering husband Victor (since I'm sure the reports he gets about my day sometimes sound like her books in the level of ridiculous).

I'm giving this one 5/5

Buy the Book!

My challenge...should I choose to accept it

Currently I own about a thousand books, maybe more or less, with that many it is difficult to get an accurate account. One whole room in my house is devoted to housing my three bookshelves, all double rowed. Books are hidden throughout my house, in the bedroom, in the living room and a couple are even stashed in the kitchen. I never leave the house without a book stashed somewhere on my person and when I travel I bring a stash of emergency books in case the places I'm going aren't civilized to have books (they usually do and I just get a sore back from lugging around an extra 10 books). Last year I joined the digital revolution and now I can tote around 350 books on my tablet, yet I still bring books along just in case.

Books are my world and they always have been. I was an early reader (tends to happen when your mom is a librarian) and by Kindergarten I had to get a special sticker on my library card for those of us who were privileged enough to read above our level. Since then I've devoured books, somewhere on the average of 7-8 a week. For most of my life these books came from the library, but then I graduated college. After graduation I moved to a small rural town with a minuscule library and I was making my own money. It was a recipe for disaster (especially with the advent of Amazon) and slowly but surely in the two years since college my collection has grown at an alarming rate. My dear fiance (who takes a year to finish one book) happily tolerates my addiction, mostly owing to the fact that it's cheaper than other things I could be addicted to (and I tolerate his Lego obsession so we're even). However, I think he reached his breaking point in January of this year when we moved from an apartment to our first home. By the time he was ready to put his desk together and unpack all of his prized computer equipment my books had taken over the house (his stuff is still in boxes in the garage by the way).

My prized collection (This doesn't count the giant basket of books in the living room, the basket in the bedroom, the 350 or so books on my tablet etc.)

When I look at my bookshelves I'm saddened by the fact that I've only read about half the books on them. I constantly start books and don't finish them because I buy some new book that catches my fancy. As an author myself (I claim that distinction even though my computer hard drive is littered with half finished manuscripts and the only full book I've ever actually written is still is that tenuous stage of query and rejection) I know how hard these people worked to write these books and I feel guilty that I've never given them their due. I look at the books and I wonder what enticed me to buy them. Hopefully one day it will be my book on the bookstore shelves and I want to understand why people choose to buy a book (and why they leave it on their shelves for years unread).

I'm giving myself a challenge; I have to read every single book currently contained in my house from start to finish. Hopefully, through this project I'll learn more about the "why" behind my book purchases and why certain books are the most awesome things in the world while others inspire you to toss them in a wood chipper.