When I picked up this novel the back cover read as follows, “Peter Paddington is your typical thirteen-year-old paperboy with a few exceptions. He’s 204 pounds, at the mercy of an overactive imagination, and his only friend is a trash-talking beauty queen reject from across the street. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Peter’s nipples pop out one day and begin speaking to him threatening to expose his private fantasies to an unkind world.”
So of course I had to purchase it and at only $2.99 it was a bargain.
Overall I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to find a copy, but if you stumble across it and it’s cheap you might enjoy reading it. It was a fun book to read, especially if you’re a ‘fat kid’ questioning your sexuality, or once were. And although my imagination is nowhere near as overactive as Peter’s and my nipples never talked to me, I couldn’t help but identify with Peter’s struggles and triumphs.
Let’s just say that any book that assumes superpowers are commonplace in society is already off to a good start. As usual I’m not sure when I added this book to my list of books to read, but I know I added it because Hero is a conglomeration of the various types of books I like to read—Young Adult, LGBT, Super Heroes, Coming of Age and Coming Out.
What a fascinating memoir. I knew who John Waters was based on his picture, but had no idea what he had done and who he was in Hollywood. He’s a cult filmmaker, I’ve only seen Hairspray, but recognized a few of the other movies listed. There were two things that I found absolutely fascinating about this book, the first was his fascination with gristliness/grunge/dirtiness and how he wrote the memoir itself.
The Berlin Stories brings together two of what Isherwood wrote while inspired by the city of Berlin. His most famous character (who I did not know), Sally Bowles, comes from this time of his life when he lived in Berlin. He lived here prior to and leading up to World War II. The two stories in this book are The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin.
Dan Savage’s The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided To go Get Pregnant was a humorous and interesting story about the adoption process from Dan and his boyfriend’s perspective. I’ve heard Mr. Savage speak and I thought he was incredibly humorous and he had a great one liner about men sleeping with men (“Gay relationships have to have good communication. We’d better talk every time we have sex, I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie there and take it for the next 20 years.”) and although I haven’t had a chance to read his weekly article, I have read his blog a few times.