Juice Thwarts Advances of Library Goons by Returning Books Within Month of Being Overdue

I just finished reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which was truly marvelous. A rich, chewy, smart, funny novel. One hundred times better than her more recent On Beauty, which was kind of gaggy and boring.

And I finally made it through Gina Kolada's book about the 1918 flu, which had so much potential but was instead poorly written, frustrating to read, and basically a complete waste of time and paper, its only redeeming quality being that the author's name has a pleasing phonetic similarity to a tasty tropical drink. I wish I had jettisoned the book a week ago when it was clear that things were not going to improve; instead, a martyr without a cause, I slogged through the damn thing with my face fixed in a more or less permanent scowl. She could have taken all of the information contained in the whole stupid book and condensed it into a 2000-word article and then it would have been worth reading. Maybe.

Other tasty books read recently: Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (full of imagination and energy and heart) and Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami (fun and quite rigorous in its absurdity, which in this case is a good thing).