Review: Wild

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

As you can imagine, working at a bookstore has done some serious damage to the reading spreadsheet, which is large enough to start looking for a job. Books used to haunt me by turning up under my questing fingers in libraries or thrift stores; now, they stare me down as I refresh displays and make sure the overstock piles aren’t going to fall over and knock me unconscious. While the exposure is much more constant, I still get those serendipitous hauntings. A used copy of Mystic Vision: The Making of Eragon turned up at the store months ago and I’m still pretending that it’s not going to come home with me. At this point in that film’s life, it’s pretty clear that it was meant to cross the path of someone who loves crap fantasy films.

Saturday Morning Opinions: 2013 in Review

2013 has been a pretty big year, for both me and the blog. Not only I have I graduated college, completed a publishing program, gotten my first job, and moved across the country, but I’ve also tinkered with my writing style, format, and various features here at the Literary Omnivore to build a leaner, meaner bookish machine. So, for the first time in the Literary Omnivore’s history as my live reading journal, I present to you this year in review on the last Saturday of the year.

Review: Tiny Beautiful Things

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed

I started Tiny Beautiful Things on a Sunday and logged into my library account later that day. Huh, I thought, it’s due tomorrow. I tried to renew it, but was faced with the fact that somebody else wanted to read it as badly as I did. What was a bibliophile in her last weeks of college to do? Why, finish it the next day, of course, neatly avoiding library fines and actual work in one fell swoop. It’s not procrastination if you’re doing something else productive, we all know that.

The Sunday Salon: Advice Columns

As a little kid, I took a very specific approach whenever I encountered a newspaper. Obviously, the only section worth anything was the Life or Lifestyle section, where I could read about celebrities whose names I had heard somewhere, read the newspaper comics (which was the vast majority of my media diet as a kid), and read the advice columns. Everything else held no interest for me. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of my youth syndicated two columns—the ever-present Dear Abby and Carolyn Hax’s Tell Me About It, which seemed to be the hipper of the two. As time went on, my parents stopped subscribing to The Atlanta Journal-Consitution, so my advice column reading became limited to occasionally reading The Ethicist in The New York Times. But over the last few months, I’ve started reading some online advice columns that blow the syndicated stuff I’ve seen utterly out of the water, and I’d like to share them with y’all today.