Friday Finds!

Thanks to MizB for hosting this fun Friday meme!

On August 25th, Dean Koontz's memoir of Trixie goes on sale, and I'm not going to order it. (That would be because I want to get it that day, I don't want to wait. If you work at my local bookstore, please, be kind and open early that day. Or I'll be standing out there, in the blazing August sun, melting before your eyes waiting...like the old Mervyn's ad, tapping the door and chanting..."Open, open, open...".

Why am I going to do this? Maybe the reasons are best summed up by a newsletter I received in the mail yesterday.

From "Useless News....but you're on our mailing list, and there's nowhere to hide."

7 Reasons Why A Big Little Life Should Be Your August Reading Experience.

1) If you buy A BIG LITTLE LIFE, your dog will love you. Of course, your dog will love you even if you don't buy A BIG LITTLE LIFE, but wouldn't it feel nice to have done something to earn that love?

2) You may be able to get the federal government to pay for this good book as part of their Cash for Clunker Books program. You send the government any seven books that you purchased but found too boring to read, and the government will give you bookstore credit worth $200,000, which you can spend to buy A BIG LITTLE LIFE and other books that are not only fun to read but also make you feel good. A nice extra of this program is that if the bookstore also sells coffee, you are allowed to spend 10% of that $200,000 on cappuccino, though you are required to use a zero-calorie sweetener and recycle your paper cup as a hat.

3) When everyone else if talking about A BIG LITTLE LIFE and you have nothing to talk about except Larry the Cable Guy's most recent fart joke, you will be embarrassed.

4) Evil extraterrestrial bodysnatchers born out of seed pods lack the sense of humor and compassion to be interested in a book like A LITTLE BIG LIFE. So are you human or not? Hmmmmm? Would you give us a blood sample and a snip of brain tissue? Would you submit to exploratory surgery to determine if you are as human inside as out? If no, why not?

5) In 1558, Nostradamus, the famous French astrologer and eerily accurate predictor of the future, wrote this: "And in those days of the new millennium, if A BIG LITTLE LIFE fails to become a #1 bestseller, the world will end in a stupendously horrible fashion that, were I to describe it, would cause my bowels to dissolve with terror." Cone on, folks, let's save the world.

6) Dogs guard the gate to Heaven and review the lives of those arriving, with special emphasis on bookstore purchases. Sit in a room alone for a while and think about that.

7) The respected review service, Booklist, says of A BIG LITTLE LIFE in a starred review: "This story is, or course, another memoir of a beloved pooch, but far from just another. Besides quite regularly manifesting her extraordinariness, Trixie made Koontz ponder the nature of intelligence, interspecies communication, sympathy, intuition, love and the loyalty it engenders, and other species' degree of consciousness, including the knowledge of personal death. Koontz leavens his musings on such weighty themes with plenty of self-deprecating humor and Trixie's comic elan to make this one dog book that everyone other than the most flint-hearted dog haters will deeply enjoy."

What can I add to that? I'm not willing to risk the future immolation of our world...are you?

All "required and necessary" reading will be put aside for a few days next week. I'm clearing my schedule for A BIG LITTLE LIFE.

What great books did you discover this past week? Share your FRIDAY FINDS with us! And check out other Friday Finds here!