#43 – Guest Posting: 17 Random Things Books Taught Me

ZOMG! I’m such a scatterbrain!  I haven’t even posted Dave’s guest posting yet!  I suck!  Here it is – and, as always with Dave’s writing, it’s freaking hilarious!

Despite this being a theme I suggested, I’ve had a lot of trouble figuring out what to write. I wanted to lock onto one idea—one book—and write about that. Couldn’t do it, though. Instead, I present 17 Random Things Books Taught Me. This started off semi-serious, but it gets dumb and stays dumb from very early on..

If you’re nauseated, you feel sick to your stomach; if you’re nauseous, you make other people sick to their stomach – The Elements of Style

Under certain circumstances, I have found myself rooting for two siblings to have sex with one another –The Hotel New Hampshire

The Weinsteins are brilliant businessmen but complete and utter assholes, and Bob Redford’s a big of a dbag – Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film

Slaughterhouses are awful environments where animals are inhumanely murdered, and where the push for faster and faster production results in even the workers themselves getting mutilated; but all the same, I still likes me a hamburger – Fast Food Nation

To kick heroin, you will need: one room which you will not leave, soothing music, ten tins of tomato soup, eight tins of mushroom soup, one large tub of vanilla ice cream, milk of magnesia, Paracetamol, mouthwash, vitamins, mineral water, Lucozade, pornography, one mattress, three buckets (for urine, feces, vomit), one television set, and Valium. Alternately: never do heroin. – Trainspotting

There are books I have read and hated but will keep and display on my shelf forever just because I love the cover design. – A Polished Hoe

If you have a spiritual philosophy that’s best summarized in nine bullet points, and you stretch it out to a ‘novel’ with no real characters or plot, and the narrator just keeps running into people who vomit information at him for two hundred and fifty pages—there’s a pretty good chance your book will make seventy kajillion dollars – The Celestine Prophecy

Clowns are fucking scary. – IT

Stories of dystopic nightmare futures are made that much more bleak when described in very long sentences with little to no punctuation. – The Road

The big-breasted look might not always be in fashion. – What To Expect When You’re Expecting

If you take a big pile of money that your parents gave you, and you burn it, and then you drift across the States for a while, and then you go out to the middle-of-fucking-nowhere-Alaska alone, armed with nothing but a bag of rice and your questionable wits, and then you die—I’m not really gonna feel that bad for you. – Into the Wild

Moloko is milk, bog is god, glazies are eyes—and I still don’t know what the sloochavvy is. – A Clockwork Orange

Everything I ever needed to know, I learned in kindergarten. – Everything I Ever Needed To Know, I Learned in Kindergarten

Never fake being crazy to stay out of prison. Chances are pretty good that you’ll end up lobotomized, then suffocated with a pillow. On the bright side, the large native man who killed you will then throw an air conditioner through a window and run away to his freedom. – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

There’s a John Steinbeck book where one of the characters tortures another character by stabbing their genitals with a knitting needle(!?!) – East of Eden

If you’re good son who does all the hard work, minds the farm, lives well, and generally respects your dad, and you have a shithead brother who goes all prodigal, asks for his inheritance early, blows it all on (we can only assume) hookers, then comes back begging when he’s all poor and hungry, your dad will throw him the mother of all parties, which makes him a bit of a dick too. – The Bible

That Gatsby character: not so great, actually. – The Great Gatsby

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  • Stupid “A Polished Hoe”. GET IT OFF MY BOOKSHELF!

    The advice from “What to Expect…” is oh, so valuable. Is it meant to make smaller breasted women feel better? WTF?

    Also – are you my Mom re. the prodigal son. She gets all huffy when she reads that. Missing.the.point! 🙂

    Reply

  • Why won't someone think of the small breasted women????

    Also, I'm with Dave and your Mom on the prodigal son! A guy at my old work was going off, at length, on what a great story it was and suchlike, but I'm like, meh. That guy's a jerk. (The guy in the story, not the guy at work)

    Reply

  • RE:
    – Hotel New Hampshire: the first time I read it, I was stunned that it was available in my (Catholic) high school library. And yet, we had no books on witchcraft. Odd, that.
    – The Road: for all of the misery and danger, it's actually a nice father/son travel story.
    – East of Eden: murder by knitting needle? So basically, I'm surrounded by weapons here?

    Reply

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