Book Goodness!

Last year, when I was going through an extremely stressful time, someone dear to me took to reading out loud to me while I relaxed on the sofa.
One of his books of choice was Florence King's "Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady"

We laughed til our sides ached at times during a period when I thought it not possible to laugh.

The other day, I lumbered over to the used bookstore, around the corner from my work, and pawed through their .35 cent book section that they had displayed outside their store.

I came across a slightly battered copy of another Florence King book, "When Sisterhood Was In Flower". Remembering the enjoyment of her previous book, I snapped it up and happily plunked my .35 cents down on the store counter.

I was not to be disappointed. Florence had taken a normally dry subject ( the feminism movement during the early 1970's) and had flipped it upside down and spun it in a web of absolute hilarity to her readers.

She recalls a time in her life when she became a sort of hostage by a radical feminist neighbor when the wall that separated their apartments crashed down from after shocks of a bomb explosion. Their two apartments became one and was soon filled with a neurotic cat and a hippy waif that they had found curled up in a cement mixer:

"When we came to the dumpy part of the beach, we found an abandoned cement mixer lying on the sand. Childlike, we peered into the ball, but instead of the nothing we expected, we found the something nobody ever expects: a dead body.

It was a white female, approximately twenty-five years old. My fingers automatically tapped out the familiar words on an imaginary stenotype machine. Polly misinterpreted my gesture.

"Stay calm. You must stay calm; otherwise the newspapers will say "the hysterical women who discovered the body." They always say that, just like they always say "the women passengers screamed" when they write about a skyjacking. Do some breathing exercises and then we'll go for the police. Ready? And one, and two, and thr--'

We both screamed. The corpse had moved."

If you happen across a Florence King book in your travels, pick it up and give it a try. I guarentee you won't be disappointed.