BiblioAddict

On personal challenges, spring catalogs, unhappy assistants, and what happens when you forget that you shouldn’t fly with stuffed sinuses:

This is the first story to satisfy my personal challenge of completing at least one short story a week, and to be honest, I’m not sure if “Our Spring Catalog: Upcoming Hardcover Titles from Gurnsey & Gable Publishing” by Jack Pendarvis exactly qualifies as a short story.

“Our Spring Catalog” is a compilation of seven short summaries of new titles being published by the fictional publishing house, written by what appears to be an unhappy editorial assistant who couldn’t care less about the books or, it seems, her job.  For instance:

As Goes the Sephyr
by Luleen Bivant
retail price $22.95
255 pages

This luminous and engaging first novel takes place in a suburbia unlike any suburbia you have ever encountered.  Marchie Whitaker’s days as a self-recriminating soccer mom and nights as an unsexed sounding board to her workaholic husband are interrupted by the surprising appearance of a rather libidinous manticore.  That’s just the beginning of the whimsical visitations!  When workers come to dig the new swimming pool – a symbol of middle class status quo that should, should, answer all of Marchie’s dreams, the most wonderful thing begins to happen.  Goblins, trolls, witches and other inhabitants of the underworld skitter upwards through the broken soil – including the great god Pan himself!  Anyway everybody wants to lock up Marchie as a crazy person because they can’t understand her magical shit.  It kind of tapers off at the end, like she ran out of ideas.

and

Eat the Lotus
by Marie Overstreet
retail price $22.00
241 pages

I swear to God I’m going to cut my own throat.  I just don’t give a shit.  Husband and wife reach a crossroads in their relationship against the colorful backdrop of blah blah blah… God I’m sick of this shit.  I’d rather work at fucking McDonald’s, I swear to God…

Did I mention I wanted to work in publishing?

“Our Spring Catalog” was a bitingly cute read that was a welcome short distraction from my stuffy nose, incessant sneezes and sniffles, and the fact that, due to a combination of stuffed sinuses and a flight from D.C. to Miami at 35,000 feet, I can no longer hear out of my left hear. 

I’m working through it though (or trying to, anyway).  Here’s hoping the decongestant I pick up tomorrow at the pharmacy helps, otherwise there may be no reading for me during the flight home on Thursday.