Dry Your Eyes

Everything Here is the Worst Thing Ever

We’re not going to talk about Justin Taylor. Maybe we should, because the caption to the above photo suggests such, but we are still waiting for our copy of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever to arrive in the mail. And, even then, it will probably take us weeks to get to it.

Here is a photo of the books we’ve been meaning to read:

Stop or You'll Go Blind

And recently we’re showing signs of adult ADD, so this is what we’ve been doing with our books:

P.D.D.C.

This is the last book that made us cry. It made us cry with a wonderful hurt that made us remember what life was like. If you haven’t read Plants Don’t Drink Coffee by Unai Elorriaga you should run out and purchase it (and by run out we mean surf over to Amazon or Powell’s or some such), and you should drag it across your eyes. Don’t put it at the bottom of a stack. Don’t make it the caboose of some glorified book-domino train. It’s set in the Basque country of Spain. It contains rugby, and dragon flies, and carpentry competitions, and old love letters looked over. We can’t tell you much else, because it would ruin the tale. Each narrative, in the four narrative split story, is packed with rose-petal scented suspense.

Here is a taste from each narrative thread:

1.

Plants don’t drink coffee. They don’t like coffee, and neither do flowers or trees. Birds don’t like it either. My aunt told me. I do. Sometimes I don’t breathe while I drink my cafe con leche.

2.

Then Gur took an olive from his pocket. It was a very dry olive. He put it in his mouth and stepped three meters or so away from the flag. When he had eaten all of the olive flesh he took the pit in his hand. Then he bent down and placed it on his right shoe, on top of the laces. Simon was by the flag and the hole, watching Gur happily. Then Gur made a funny motion with his foot and the olive pit flew toward the twelfth hole. Because Gur’s intention was just that: to get the olive pit into the twelfth hole.

3.

Every time Mateo went to the library to steal books he brought some cardboard in his pocket. Something bright; red cardboard, or neon green, or yellow. And Mateo would leave the cardboard on the shelf he’d taken the book from, and write: “I’ve stolen this book.” Then he’d write the author’s name, the title of the book, the publisher, the year it was published and, if he had time, the ISBN too.

4.

Sorin, Monkey Boy:

How are the legs? How many toes did they remove in the end? Four? You’ll have to draw plans with your hands now, unlike before. You’ll lose some of your style. A question, Sorin: after being removed from your foot, did your toes still wiggle?

Unfortunately we can’t get to the sad part. It gives too much way. Instead we’ll show you the saddest video we could find. — Brian Allen Carr

Video: This Girl Didn’t Mean To