10/17/2006

Reading A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich, by Alice Childress. He found it at a thrift store a couple of years ago and bought it because of the title. It's about a teenage dope addict and is told through the eyes of all involved--the teenager, his mom, his stepdad, and the pusher. The book is peppered with clever sayings and written largely in Ebonics.

On the back of the book is a sticker that says "The Center School" with a phone number and he's been wanting to call it and find out how the book was distributed, but has put it off, fearing the number has changed and it'll be for Dominoes or something.

Recently he read Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy; On Writing, by Stephen King; and The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien--the title refers to photographs and other belongings the soldiers carried to Vietnam--which he'll probably read again because it was so good...and he never reads books twice. He's also read Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, which is about a soldier who decides to walk to Paris to sign a treaty to end the war--the book, he said, reads like an LSD trip.

On an unrelated note--the reader's self-described "scalped" look is due to a haircut he got yesterday.