Book Review

My "main book" right now, which I call it to distinguish it from all the other books I am reading for all the other reasons, is Colm Tóibín's novel about Henry James. Well, folks, the other night, I turned a page and it popped right out in my fingers. Not torn, the page, quite whole, it just neatly popped from its place and removed itself from the book as if it hadn't been glued there at all. "Is this something to 'blog' about?" I mused silently within the seething depths of my soul. "It certainly was a dramatic incident!" But I put it out of my mind, until last night, when I was somewhat further along in the story... POP! And those caps are not accurate. It was an inaudible pop with which a second page dislodged itself from the book. And, look. "Turning" the pages is too violent a verb for what I do. Why, I'm not even creasing the spine of this delicate darling book. I'm barely holding it open! The pages are just coming out. The first time it happened, I paced back and forth in front of Dr. Theresa, declaring that something like this had never happened to me before, in all my many, many years of reading books since the days I was a precious tot. Dr. Theresa mentioned some unrelated bookish mishaps from her own experience, but none, she agreed, in which the pages of a book were just randomly popping out. But! Allow me to come clean. As I dug through the "blog," which serves as my main form of memory after (and before) recent medical unpleasantness, I discovered a few similar occasions. If you like, you may "click" on the appropriate upcoming "hyperlinks" to learn more. There was a book left out in the rain, and, of course, the old dictionary that I literally read to pieces - the latter a sort of intellectual abuse to which I also subjected a collection of interviews with screenwriters. And who can forget the time I found a pristine-looking 40-year-old paperback and opened it up and eight pages fell out? Well, I could, and did, forget that. But let me point out that this book by Colm Tóibín purports to be brand spanking new, fresh from the warehouse. Oh, Scribner! Your name used to mean something in this dirty world! Surely Charles Scribner and all his sons are out there rolling in their various (I assume) graves.