Poshdeluxe

the posh deluxe reading rainbow report

the history of love by nicole krauss

i have to admit, this is one of those books that you’ll see in the window of every single airport bookstore. for the past few months, whenever i passed one of those shops, this book would blend in with the latest from jackie collins and john grisham.

then, on one of my trips to boston, i finished whatever i was reading and, in order to survive the next several hours of flight with potentially screaming children, ran into a bookstore.

this was the only book that didn’t have a cat, gun or flower on the cover.

i actually didn’t even read this book on the plane (jetblue’s tv screens were too tempting), so it’s been sitting in my “to-read” pile for a while.

i can’t believe i let it sit there for so long.

you guys, this book is beautiful.

this book is too amazing, too wonderful, too heartbreaking to dwell in airport news stands.

this book deserves its own special room, with simple curtains and clean walls, where people can sit and read and absorb it.

i’ll tell you that it’s about a fifteen year old girl named alma, who misses her dead father and searches for a way to drive her mother’s fog of sadness away. it’s about an old jewish man named leo gursky, who escaped the nazis in poland and still pines for the girl who left him behind. and i have to mention bird, alma’s brother, who believes himself to possibly be the messiah and gives alma a life jacket to protect her from the flood that he knows will surely destroy the earth. Continue reading ‘now you know who wrote the book of love’

ryan adams & the cardinals: sweet illusions

the poshdeluxe reading rainbow report

miss wyoming by douglas coupland

i’ve loved douglas coupland for a long time. i read “life after god” some time in 2002-2003 and immediately went to half price books so i could pick up “shampoo planet,” “girlfriend in a coma,” etc. his books tend to be an eccentric combination of sarcastic and sweet, optimistic and critical. half of the time, i don’t know if i can stand the characters, but something in me loves to watch them falter and fail and love and give it the old texas try. occasionally i feel like i could be writing his books, but not in a bad way. more like, his thoughts mirror mine; his musings remind me of things i’ve wondered while staring at the ceiling fan while waiting to fall asleep or looking up at the sky through a car window as the scenery drizzles by.

“miss wyoming” centers around two characters, john and susan, who are both dealing with celebrity fall-out. once famous, they now teeter on the edge of existence, and both wonder if there’s more out there than lunches at the ivy and endless calls from agents. susan grew up on the pageant circuit with a cray cray stage mom, marilyn, and her narratives from convention centers and the bathroom at orange julius were probably my favorite segments of the book.

per usual with coupland, there’s a few extremely random, unreal events that explode within the pages of the book, and yet he manages to pass them off as hum-drum without dulling their unreal sheen. he’s a master at manipulating the bizarre into reality, and that’s one of the reasons his books are so enjoyable– you don’t know what will happen next, but whatever it is, it’ll probably be totally insane, and you will buy it. Continue reading ‘the plastic radiant way’