osodecanela | The books on the nightstand...

I scored a copy of "Michael Tolliver Lives" yesterday afternoon. A friend mentioned that he had seen the book being carried at Costco so it merited a stop for the book and a fast hotdog for lunch. I was in Santa Rosa, having made the journey across county to go to a house sale of a friend who is now planning to move into smaller digs. I had hoped to snag a couple of nicer gifts for two of my nephews who have recently graduated from college, but no such luck. There were two books that tickled me no end, which I pocketed for the exorbitant price of one dollar. The late Molly Ivins book "Shrub" which I'd seen an excerpt of some time back and decided I should read, plus a book of parody news articles from "The Onion" that have graced their pages over the last dozen years or so. On the front cover, was an article titled "Clinton deploys vowels to Bosnia - town of Grznc first in line to receive aid". There was no way for me to pass that one up, but then grandma's last name was one of those near impossible Eastern European names for most Americans to pronounce. You had to go six letters in to get to the first vowel and it was a "Y".

So these three volumes, along with Michael Chabin's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" (a novel whose premise is, what would have happened had the State of Israel not been established and instead most of the Jews fleeing Europe in the 30s and 40s landed in coastal Alaska instead?) and Al Gore's "The Assault on Reason" currently grace my nightstand. Now the only catch is I have to be alert enough when I go to bed actually open one of these books without passing out.