The Library Lady Recommends...

I finished my third Celia Rivenbark book this weekend, and if you've never heard of her, get thee to a bookstore and check her out. She's a southern humor columnist, and she's been compared to both Dave Barry and Jeff Foxworthy. Really, how can you go wrong with someone touted as a cross between those two?

She has three books that are collections of her columns: Bless Your Heart, Tramp; We're Just Like You, Only Prettier; and Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank. Like Dave Barry, she points out the absurdities of everday life; like Foxworthy, she both reveres and pokes good-natured fun at southern culture. You can get a taste of her writing by reading a few of the columns posted on her website, http://www.celiarivenbark.com/. I've read all three books now, and I laughed out loud reading each of them.

I'm on kind of a nonfiction kick, so I picked up Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves. It's a book about punctuation. That made the NY Times bestseller list. Seriously. It's actually a very funny little book. A good friend from college loaned it to me; she and I used to go on long tirades about all the language errors we spotted on Lexington news channels when we both lived there. She was always tempted to call WKYT and tell them that they desperately needed a copy editor and that she was the right woman for the job; I still think that may be her true calling. See my earlier post about apostrophes; I get pretty uptight over the deteriorating state of our language, too. Which is probably why I am planning on knocking back a few cocktails later this month after I spend an entire work day scoring senior writing portfolios....

If all this nonfiction burns me out a little, I will try to finish the notorious Hannibal Rising. Yes, readers, I am still trying to finish that book, which I talked about in my very first posts. And yes, it's THAT BAD.