Tuesday, May 16, 2006

my amazon review

I'm tired because we had a lengthy day at the hospital. An MRI, itself no big deal, really, but for a three-year-old. Therefore sedation, therefore empty stomach and I.V. Not a good mix for the temper of an already volatile kid. But really, he did well. So did we as parents, I might add. We stayed well within our bribe budget and the pacificatory treats were also kept to a minimum. He was genuinely hungry, so he didn't need to be plied with popsicles. He was actually asking for "white cheese" while we were waiting for the MRI to be available. ("White cheese" means anything that's not cheddar - "orange cheese" - and not too stinky - "Daddy's cheese.")
Like I said, things went well. Now we wait for the results.
But, because I was busy, I'll just post something I whipped up for Amazon.com when they sent me an email asking me to review some books I'd purchased. Here you go (last time I checked, 1 of 1 people found the review unhelpful - hmph):

I am flattered that such an august company as Amazon.com would select me to review The Bible: Authorized King James Version With Apocrypha (Oxford Classics). (They also asked me to review Samuel Johnson’s Essays and the collection Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, but there’s only room for one book per review.)
I’m not sure of my qualifications to review any of these, but I’ll attempt to rise to the occasion.
Where to start? Characters, plotting, pacing, authorial intent, believability? It is all one big blur.
Maybe I should start by saying I haven’t read the whole thing. Next, let me state that I got it for reference purposes, to stand alongside my dictionary, thesaurus, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and, thanks to a book-jacket blurb by Garrison Keillor, Roy Blount’s Book of Southern Humor and Shakespeare’s collected works.
And as such, this edition doesn’t fare as well as it might. I appreciate that it is neither gaudy nor ornate, and that it doesn’t have the word “Holy” plastered all over it (a selling point for someone of my non-persuasion), so it fits well on a shelf along other fat, unread books. But the useful table of contents, the “List of Books of the Bible” (as it says in the “Contents” on p. vii) isn’t until p. lxxiii. If I ever have to look up anything, I need to go to lxxiii first. (And, let me warn you, it’s not alphabetical. X comes before L, which comes before C, but after I.)
Anyway, the first thing I looked up was a reference in “Roughing It,” by Mark Twain. He referred the reader to Numbers, 37. I’m sure it’s symbolic that this was the first thing I looked up, but I don’t know of what.

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