nicholas: 123; muriel: 0

I've had terrible luck with books lately—nearly everything I've picked up I soon put back down. In desperation I went to Borders tonight looking for something by Muriel Spark, whose The Girls of Slender Means I read and loved a year ago. I was hoping to pick up a copy of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but I would have settled for anything of hers. Anything. But it turns out my local neighborhood chain bookstore doesn't carry a single book by Muriel Spark. If you like Nicholas Sparks, on the other hand, your selection runneth over. There were, I shit you not, one hundred twenty-three copies of various Nicholas Sparks books. Not that I stood there and counted.

If you have any book suggestions (don't fail me now, J Quizzle), leave them in the comments or shoot me an email at gruelfordinner [at] gmail [dot] com. Recommending Nicholas Sparks would be cruel, not funny.

as god as my witness, i will never eat microwaved spinach again

Do you know what this is?


It is a stack of unread New Yorkers dating back to June 30, 2008. I will not throw them away, because I'm planning to read them. In chronological order, of course, because that is how they were meant to be read.

What I'm trying to tell you is that I microwaved spinach for dinner last night at my one-day-a-week job. The results? Flaccid. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

For example, winter. Anyone who says that puppies don't need parkas doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm looking at you, the yachtsman.