I’m
going to be honest at first I was not excited to read this at all. I mean,
books in high school are dreaded. No one wants to read the boring book your
teacher raves about. High school teachers aren’t cool, they ruin books for me.
If they like it, I don’t want to. I know it’s really stupid, but it’s true!
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so.
I
thought it was going to be some old lady complaining about how her family
dragged her from state to state, and how her life fell apart, and she started
doing drugs, and became an addict, and went to rehab, and got better, and
writes books about it now. But that’s not at all what this book is like. I
immediately fell in love with it.
Sarah
Vowell is a total bad ass. She is so damn cool! If I met this lady, she’d
probably be my best friend. Her essays are creative and funny, and all of the
messages she sends through her writing are right in front of you. They’re
simple and straight forward and all you have to do is think about it.
If you look through the funny
stories she tells, you can see a deeper meaning. It’s like finding a nugget of
wisdom in her words. For example, listen to this quote. She’s talking about her
father and his obsession with a cannon. And even though, it has nothing to do
with any of her interests she can find a way to relate to him. “I love noise.
As a music fan, I’m always waiting for that moment in a song when something
just fires out of it and explodes in the air. My dad is a one-man garage band,
the kind of rock ‘n’ roller who slaves away at his art to make his own sound.
My dad is an artist-a pretty driven, idiosyncratic one, too.” Then goes on to
say, “When my father dies, take a wild guess what he wants done with his ashes.
Here’s a hint: it requires a cannon.” That’s where I’m sold.
What I love about Sarah is, so far,
there’s no life changing event that caused her to spiral out of
control and sell meth to children or anything. She’s a completely normal down
to earth band geek. Anyone could relate to the stories.
Vowell is also a grammatical
genius. If you took all of the sentences with alliteration out of her book, on
to separate pages, you’d have another book of random rambling words that wither
together like apple sauce on Adams street. Like what?! My life is flipping
upside down and I love it. Check it out, I’ll quote a few of my favorite. “the
ballistic bee in his bonnet” (That’s completely relevant to the story, too.) “shaky
one the xylophone, and putrid on the piano.” It sounds like a song.
Generally speaking, I don’t like
memoirs. For obvious reasons too, just reference the first paragraph of this
essay. I reluctantly picked this book because it was about a girl who moved
around a lot, and I am a girl who’s moved 8 times. I figured that I could
probably relate to her in that way, but it turns out that I am Sarah Vowell.
My
favorite, favorite, favorite part is how she breaks up the book. It’s kind of
like a multi-genre essay. Except, mostly memoirs and lists and what not but the
theme that runs through them is so strong it’s like reading through one book.
You can get a lesson out of every single different essay too.
I need to stop rambling now, but
hands down this book is a keeper. I’m excited to annotate the crap out of it
and just take in everything it has to offer. I’m learning a lot from my pal,
Sarah.
-Saddy Mack
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