From the archives...
Tripe of the Month
Club
-by Sean Fitzmorris
[Not so] recently my wife and I received in the
mail a brochure offering us to join the “Book of the Month” club.
The booklet stirred some curiosity in us, so we scanned through it,
seeking out titles that would grab and hold our attention. We were
not disappointed. As we perused our choices, we were astounded at
some the names of the books offered.
Now don’t get me
wrong; I know that there are only so many hundreds of thousands of
words in the English language. Therefore writers must be severely
constrained as to titular choices. In view of these obvious
restrictions, therefore, naming works is all about shock value. Grab
the reader’s attention by the throat like a rabid pit bull on crack
and don’t let go until he buys that book! It is for this reason
that we have books with names like we noticed in the Book of the
Month Club presentations.
One of the first titles to catch our
notice was How to Cook Everything. What an ambitious tome this
must be! Imagine! Detailed instructions on cooking everything!
My mind boggled with the possibilities. Oh, I’m sure it had all the
usual trite recipes, ingredient lists, metric conversion charts and
so on. But one can only assume that there are steps to preparing for
a delicious repast shoes, concrete, hazardous gasses, the
aforementioned pit bull and presumably, the book itself. How far does
it go? Does this volume avoid the obvious taboo of, say, cannibalism?
On whom were the recipes for everything tried? Woe to the unfortunate
soul who had to undergo the dubious honor of being the guinea pig for
the chapter on “Sharp Objects.”
Another title that
surprised me was Fitness Walking For Dummies; A Reference For the
Rest of Us. Fitness walking for dummies? I must say that
if anyone needs to purchase a book on how to walk, then I doubt if
fitness is truly their most pressing problem. The last time I
researched the matter of walking, I realized that the process of
actually getting up and going over to the bookshelf pretty much
resolved any questions I might have had. Evidently, though, I have
not appreciated all the subtle nuances of walking, since someone
found it necessary to write an entire volume expositing what for all
these years I have taken for granted. Maybe it goes through the
history of walking, possibly devoting chapters with titles such as
“The First Big Step - Crawling from the Primordial Ooze”; “From
All Fours to Biped Locomotion – An Illustrated History”; and of
course the requisite tear-jerking stories of persecution and the
human spirit, “Walking Through the War Years.”
Rules for Aging
is another name that touched a curious place in me. I can just
picture the Nursing Home Police stationing themselves down the
corridors of the retirement center, handing out citations to all the
inmates who were non-compliant with the Rules for Aging. Who exactly
is supposed to get these aging individuals to learn and later follow
these rules? And who made them up? Some inconvenienced young person,
I’ll wager, who is bitter over having to care for his older parents
that gave up their own lives to unselfishly provide for such an
ingrate. I always figured that aging individuals had pretty much
earned the right to make up the rules for themselves and didn’t
need some whippersnapper to tell them what to do.
One gripping story
that I can’t wait to read is called How to Clean Practically
Anything. This must be the long-awaited sequel to the previous
How to Cook Everything. Logically, one would need to clean up
after cooking “everything.” So what a handy reference this must
be! I wonder if the author accepted the challenge of describing how
to clean dirt. Anyone can figure out cleaning linoleum, clothes,
walls, cars and so on, but really spic-and-span dirt is my test to
them. So how ‘bout it?
A few other titles
raised some thought provoking questions. For instance, how did the
author of Extraordinary Sex Now manage to find the time to
actually pen this tome? Furthermore, how did he/she determine what
was “extraordinary” as opposed to the merely ordinary? No doubt
there are those among us who would consider any sex
extraordinary, no matter how plain. What about the author’s
partner(s)? Did they too consider this sex extraordinary? How do we
know that the author is not such a dullard to the point that
extraordinary sex is any form of copulation during which his or her
partner didn’t fall asleep? One would think that Slow Hand:
Women Writing Erotica would be a natural successor to this work.
But I’ll gamble that absolutely none of the heroes and heroines in
Slow Hand display a working knowledge of any of the advice
given in Extraordinary Sex Now, perpetuating my probably
misogynistic theory that women don’t even know what they want, so
how can we men?
Don’t even get me
started on Get Anyone to Do Anything. I can only assume that
this is the great-granddaddy of encyclicals from which all the other
book titles I have reviewed here spring. How to Manage Your Mother
was another title which drew my inquisitive gaze, but about which I
found it necessary to write an entirely separate article.
Yes, I know the old
adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover. But as book covers
are all that the Book of the Month Club has given me to go by, I say
that they are fair game. Now please excuse me, but I must go finish
reading The Idiot’s Guide to Forming Premature Opinions.
