Books You've Thrown Away

[heyalice]

Last night I finished reading FINAL PAYMENTS by Mary Gordon. I was so mad I was shaking. Maybe I couldn't understand what drove the main character because since retiring from the Mother Church I've become a heathenous wench with no soul. But this shit really PISSED me off.
Thank you for allowing me to vent.

[Deleted]

On the airplane today I finished Bait & Switch by Barbara Ehrenrich. I almost left it on the plane until I remembered that a friend loves her books so I'm just going to give it to her and tell her to keep it. It's crazy because I almost always agree with the message she is trying to put forward--I just LOATHE the way she communicates it. Same as in Nickel & Dimed. She has this attitude of "My aren't I so brilliant? Everyone else is just a moron. If it weren't for me, no one would be able to communicate these very important points about the lower and middle class."

In this book she attempts to highlight how hard it is for the unemployed to find jobs in this economy. I agree with this. She talks about how many people are undemployed. I completely agree with this. My 60-something father is currently working in retail to pay the bills because he's unhireable due to his age. So yes, I REALLY agree with this.

But someone needs to tell this biatch that it's not what you say---it's how you say it. In this book she attempts to get a PR job. AND she expects to be a director or work in management in PR despite the fact that she has never worked in PR for one day in her life. And her writing is peppered with insults like "Fools!" when talking about other PR practitioners at an educational session she attends. She frequently walks up to companies at job fairs and tells them why their company sucks and how she can help them. Honey, the "PR" stands for "Public Relations" You might want to try communicating with potential employers without insulting them within the first 30 seconds.

She's so insulting and snotty about everything. Not to mention the fact that I really feel like she has a great message she's trying to communicate. I just wish she'd stop doing all this faux investigative reporting and just use people's stories to move along the message.

The whole book made me want to scream.

[Cranky Old Broad]

Maybe this should go in the True Confessions thread, considering how this trilogy seems to be loved by so many here. This is only my opinion and not a reflection upon anyone else's likes or dislikes. I realize I'm opening myself up to being pelted with rotten vegetables, belittled with verbal abuse, etc. but I just have to get this off of my chest:

I despised His Dark Materials and I literally threw all three books away after realizing mid-way through the second after the characters cut yet another hole in reality with that super duper knife (sorry...the details have grown fuzzy with the passage of time...mercifully) that I just didn't give a crap about the story. I closed book two, gathered up the rest and tossed them gently in the trash.

They were the first (and only) books I've ever thrown away.


O/T: I'm getting the strangest feeling that I've posted this before. I did a search to see if I had or if it's just deja vu but for some reason search isn't working for me. If it's a repeat, sorry about that!

[Margo]

Cranky, I didn't throw them away, but I stopped after two of them without reading the third, and never understood all the hype. The characters feel underdeveloped, and Lyra seems like she has no personality at all.

[Margo]

I decided to borrow a book on table manners from the library, and the closest I could come to that was getting a book on etiquette or manners. I borrowed The New Manners For The '90s by Letitia Baldrige. The book was written in 1990, but you'd think it was written in the 50s. I flipped to the section on table manners (and discovered that neither my mom or I are wrong, we're just eating in different styles - American for her and continental for me) and stopped reading. Here's a juicy quote to explain why (from the section on unmarried people living together):

"And whatever you do -- again, with my own voice ringing through -- get yourself to that church or temple to get married as soon as possible. Hanging out together within the state of matrimony is much greater than without!"

Everyone on the feminism thread would be livid after reading that.

[berrybearie]

I'm more than halfway through the Celestine Prophecy and I just don't know if I can trudge on. It was in the 4-for-the-price-of-3 bin at Borders, and seemed like it would be an interesting sort of adventure/mystery, but the clumsy philosophy and psychobabble is so groanworthy, I keep wanting to smack the characters for the inane, yet oh so deep and spiritual, dialogue. I may make it to the end, but I don't see myself getting less annoyed.

[kanding]

I'm not sure this belongs here, but I bought 102 Minutes a few months ago and absolutely cannot read it. It chronicles what happened between the planes hitting the World Trade Center and the towers collapsing. I just can't do it. I'm not throwing it away, but I'm burying it until I find someone to take it away. What was I thinking when I bought it?

[Deleted]

Jensational, I know what you mean. I didn't read Bait and Switch because I can't stand Ehrenreich. She really seems to be completely clueless about the tone of her delivery. Nickel and Dimed made some good points, but all of her big revelations seemed like common sense to me. Then again, I spent several years working mimimum wage jobs in high school and college so I had met people that used those wages to live.

Everything I have ever read by her is snide, condescending and indicates she is completely full of herself.

[BinkyBetsy]

I may have mentioned this before, but I was unable to take Barbara E. seriously when, at the end of the first segment, she quit her waitressing job on the spot rather than work her way out of the weeds. Basically, it came down to "This is what they call being 'slammed'...and I can't take it." Right. Because it's just SO unfair that you had to, like, earn your pay.

That said, I don't think the book, overall, was a bad idea. If her overreaction to stuff that many people take for granted ("OMG! Poor people eat a lot of starch! OMG, doing recovery at Wal-Mart is mindnumblingly repetitive!") spurred her fellow limousine liberals into taking any kind of action to improve working conditions for minimum-wage workers, hey, whatever it takes. It probably had more of an impact coming from her spoiled-ass POV than if it was compiled by someone who doesn't point out stuff like maids not eating lunch* because they don't think it's worth mentioning.

*Hello? Because a full stomach actually slows you down. You eat a granola bar and have dinner when you get home. I've BEEN a maid; I know.

[Deleted]

BinkyBetsy, I totally agree. I think that's why her books bother me so much. At the heart of it, they are trying to point out things that I really don't think the powers that be realize. Such as: just because you work for minimum wage, it doesn't mean you're lazy, in fact you do more physically draining labor and most of the people working these jobs are trying to feed a family or make their lives better. And in her later book it IS true that the economy was horrible for those unemployed and most are now underemployed through no fault of their own.

It's just that her tone is so unbelievably annoying to me that I can't get through a book of hers without throwing them at the wall numerous times.