25 books this summer?

The title of this post may or may not be a ridiculous attempt, but I'll know in a couple weeks. I took a summer job at the Nebraska Book Company. Nothing crazy, about $8 an hour, basically moving books around and sorting them alphabetically. Kind of like I did as a kid with baseball cards by number, player or team. It's been slow so far since a lot of the shipments won't come in for another week or two, giving me a few minutes here and there to sneak in a couple pages.

I finished my first book today, T.C. Boyle's latest, "Talk Talk."

Boyle is one of my favorite authors and I consider his book "Drop City" one of my favorite all time reads. In "Talk Talk" he goes about telling the story in his same whimsical manner, adding all kinds of minute details that leave me in awe of his ability to craft a scene.

The story basically revolved around a man and a woman who date, the woman is deaf and the man isn't. They figure out when she gets arrested for outstanding warrants that someone has stolen her identity and is racking up credit card debt and felony charges against her all over the West Coast. The two spend the entirety of the book tracking down the thief and much craziness ensues. I was a little let down with the book. I didn't care much for the protagonists because they seemed to make some pretty stupid decisions, and the identity thief didn't go down in flames in a manner that I was hoping for at the end of the book. But I do realize that Boyle isn't about creating stories that tell us what we want to hear. Instead he crafts characters who have realistic flaws.

We get angry at our friends and family and ourselves for doing stupid shit all the time. So these characters are realistic, but that doesn't necessarily make them likable. In any case, it was an enjoyable read, it just didn't meet my expectations.

After I finished the Boyle book I immediately picked up "Smashed" and started reading.

I'm only about 30 pages in but I guess it tells the story of a girl who starts drinking at the age of 14 and takes the habit to some pretty extreme places. It hasn't gotten dramatic yet, she's still a freshman and wanting more opportunities to lush it up, but I'll keep you posted as to how it turns out.

In other news I got my grades for the semester and the lowest was a B, by far my best semester ever. Go me.