Still Day 75: "The Differently-Abled Economy"

YAY! New followers!!!!!! But none of you said what you wanted in return??? Thank you for making my whole day!

I was listening to NPR the other day and they were debating on what to call the current economic recession. To quote "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" on their January 31st show:

Pandemic, contagion, crisis, catastrophe, disaster, fiasco, I'm not a big crunch fan, it's not a scary enough word. But what are we gonna call this current trouble? Will children 40 years from now say, "Grandma, what did you do during the post-millenial cluster-bleep"? A good name should reflect at the depth of the crisis, and perhaps hint at it's cause, perhaps The Great National Binge and Purge, The Differently-abled Economy, and The United States and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Investment Return." We should call it, instead of the Great Depression, The Severe Depression and then the stimulus package can include Zoloft and Ben n' Jerrys--the Clinical Depression.

(These people are funny, I tell you.)

So, because of this Clincial Depression our country has going on, I'm going to start a new segment on my blog. It's called: The Goodwill Book Review.

Have you ever taken a good, long look at the bookshelves at a Goodwill, Deseret Industries, Salvation Army, or--really--any high class thrift store? It is a veritable smorgasbord of high end literature. You can find, amongst the stacks, self-help, comedy, romance, cookbook, and welding instruction. So what if that edition of What Color Is Your Parachute 1997 is a bit, oh, 12 years ago. A true principle is a true principle, my friends.

Now, I happen to be a book fiend who could easily plop down hundreds of dollars at my local bookstores. I like libraries. They're great. But libraries have a general "shush" policy that doesn't happen to mesh well with my children's "tornado siren" volume settings. So, whenever I go to the library, I find myself frantically pulling books off the shelf that aren't really good and I never read, all because I am carrying three wiggling, giggling children. By the time I get the books home, actually get the books out of the car three days later, read the first chapter or two of any of them, they're already overdue and I might as well have bought a good book to begin with.

Here is where Goodwill comes in. You can buy any paperback--ANY PAPERBACK--for 50 cents to $1.00. Hardbacks will cost $2.00. So, since I love books, but I also love my children and don't want to put us on food stamps just to satisfy my thirst for the written word, I'll now be reviewing my latest pre-loved find here.

First up? To the Tower Born by Robin Maxwell. I'm only 100 pages in, but I can already tell you one thing: I like it a darn sight better than that punishing novel, The Other Boleyn Girl, that I read last year. Stay tuned for this and other exciting titles which may or may not include PRUNING YOUR GARDEN, The Rise and Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, and The Spaniard's Defiant Virgin: A Harlequin Romance.