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Stumpage Reports
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Friday, April 18, 2003 :::
Narcissistic, Egocentric, Blurbing Blog Entry
The above title could work for most of my entries. I used to do book reviews for the Charlotte Observer newspaper. Last night I was working on my resume and needed to check how many I had done and when. I have a scrapbook with all of them in there and started going through it. I hadn't looked at it for a couple years and reread a bunch of them and found myself thinking "Some of these are pretty damn good." I'm usually pretty self-critical and dislike anything I wrote more than a couple days ago.
In most of the reviews (and a lot of blog entries) there was often one particular phrase I liked and hoped would make it past the editor. Sometimes it was a cliche, sometimes something slightly ribald or disgusting, or just a little putting-together-of-words that I liked. With all the reviews I did, I was never blurbed on a book. So here's my own damn blurbs, a selection of some of my favorite phrases from book reviews I did between December 1996 and April 2000.
Picking up The Harlot By the Side of the Road, the reader may expect just to be shocked -- and maybe to get a perverse thrill from the stories of rape, incest, mass circumcisions and divine wrath. --- The Harlot By the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible, Jonathan Kirsch.
...a group of small-town children fighting off ancient Egyptian gods, a dead (but walking) World War I vet, giant tunneling lampreys and a truck full of festering roadkill. --- Summer of Night, Dan Simmons.
...a nightmarish, grainy world, peopled by the shivering denizens of Pierce's mad realm. --- Bringing Out the Dead, Joe Connelly.
[The author] forces intellectual art theory on a painting of a scantily clad woman being tortured by a drooling, hunchbacked dwarf. --- Pulp Art: Original Cover Paintings, Robert Lesser.
...the best description of a neighborhood bar since chapter three of Moby Dick. --- The Last Word: the New York Times Book of Obituaries and Farewells, Martin Siegel, ed.
There are also gothic rumblings of deeper secrets: alcoholism, suicide and infanticide. --- N.C. Wyeth, David Michaelis.
Hemingway's fiction, and the biographical blurbs on the covers of his books, are a fascinating blend of fact and imagination. --- True at First Light, Ernest Hemingway.
...Keegan describes the tangled web of alliances and ambitions that ignited powder keg Europe. --- The First World War, John Keegan.
...the true story of a plague that rode in on a pale horse in 1918, and killed more people than World War I. --- Flu: the Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918, Gina Kolata.
I'm just happy I got to add the phrases "festering roadkill" and "drooling hunchbacked dwarf" to the lexicon of the Charlotte Observer.
::: posted by tom at 10:25 PM
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