A New Review

I love reviews! Here is a new one, by H.T. Reynolds, on amazon.com. Thank you very much, H.T.!

She thinks The Closet's All Mine is the best relationship (or non-relationship) advice book she has ever read, which is indeed a very nice thing for her to say. My favourite advice book of all time is Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hollis, although I think Ecclesiastes is also an advice book, and we ought to love it most. Live Alone and Like It, perhaps because it was written before the sexual dissolution, is compatible with Catholic moral teaching in a way my dating faves, The Rules and He's Just Not That Into You, are not.

The Girls' Guide to Surviving a Break-up, which I found for sale in a Jesuit library (hee hee!), by Delphine Hirsh is excellent, and I mention it in My Book. (Indeed, I need it in My Book!) And while I'm on the subject, I should praise Co-Dependent No More by Melodie Beattie which, thank Providence, I found after a heart-rending psychodrama with an alcoholic. Anyone who loves or is in love with a boozer, drugger or gambler should read Co-Dependent No More.

Advice books are a lot of fun, but I only really like them if they have literary or comic merit. The Rules, which doesn't have literary or comic merit, is the exception. I would love to write a very literary advice book, perhaps in the style of another age, in the voice of an unusually well-educated elderly woman (reputed to be a witch) to a very young woman, whom she loves. I would shove in as much advice as I could, of all kinds, although perhaps I'd have to learn a lot more first:

Take heed, my spiritual daughter, and invite not men to thy house unless thou art having a general celebration with many guests, in which case thou ought to prepare the provinder the day before, buying minced lamb from the butcher, rolling it in flour flecked with marjoram, and mixing it with a small diced onion, four tablespoons of beef stock and a tablespoon of ye HP sauce, before plunging it into muffin tins lined with pastry made from a pound of flour, and a weight of lard melted in hot milk-and-water. Such delicacies are much thought of in Scot Land, where good husbands can be found amongst those fleeing the increasingly vile errors of Canterbury, taking refuge in the motherly bosom of Holy Church.