Thursday, January 11, 2007

partially read

Daniel Handler's Watch Your Mouth
As some of you may recall, Handler's work has always been hit or miss for me (looooved Basic 8, HAAAATED Adverbs) so I began this book with some trepidation. But page five was all about Pittsburgh, and you know I'm a sucker for books about my hometown! However, the Pittsburgh in this book is some sort of alternate version, where the Benedum Center is the Benedrum Center, and there are all sorts of landmarks that don't actually exist. Anyway, the narrator is a college student (who imagines his life as an opera) who's gone home with his girlfriend to Pittsburgh for the summer to be counselors at a Jewish day camp (just like the one I went to!). Unfortunately, her family turns out to be pretty crazy, and after 89 pages of people obsessively discussing incest (and apparently one incident of actual incest), I had to call it quits.

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