Her entry begins:
My book club has been reading novels that have either won or been short-listed for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, which has been a great way to engage – or sometimes reengage—with books that I intended to read but that in many cases slipped off my radar. Our most recent selection was Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz. I’m embarrassed to say that I had not previously read Enright’s fiction and was very glad to have picked this up. It's a slim, elegant novel, written from the point of view of an unreliable and unlikeable narrator. Set in Dublin in 2009, the novel centers on an adulterous affair, which might sound reductive, but Enright manages to avoid the sorts of tropes one might expect with such a pat storyline. The writing is gorgeous and...[read on]About Word Salad, from the publisher:
Matilda loves logic and order, and now her structured world is falling apart—in a bookstore.Visit Susan Coll's website.
Former economics major Matilda is moving back to her hometown of Washington D.C. to care for her ailing mother, and she’s desperate for money. She takes ajob at her neighborhood bookstore and tries, in vain, to make sense of illogical business of books. To make things worse, she’s forced to team up with a new hire—the enigmatic, flaky, larger-than-life, Sage—who shows up on her first day of work with zero administrative skills and her tiny, puffy, incessantly urinating dog that resembles an underfed rat.
Something in the chaos begins to remind Matilda of her long-neglected creative side, and she starts to rediscover the person she once was before so much got in the way. But things get even more unmanageable when Matilda and Sage are tasked with putting together an event for the reclusive and controversial Dr. Jordan Rutabaga, a windbag of a public intellectual with a cult following that includes a number of people who would like to literally and figuratively see him dead. Rutabaga has a long list of alleged misdeeds, from plagiarism to failure to pay child support to stiffing the nanny.
As the event date approaches, Matilda and Sage discover that Sage and Rutabaga have their own not uncomplicated past, adding yet another person to list of people who do not wish him well. Add in a lawsuit and an impending snowstorm along with the potentially sinister presence of Rutabaga himself, and Matilda is about to come undone.
Bestselling author Susan Coll’s gastric, bookish, laugh-out-loud comedy of manners reminds us that sometimes things have to completely fall apart for them to perfectly come together.
Coffee with a Canine: Susan Coll & Zoe.
The Page 69 Test: Acceptance.
The Page 69 Test: Beach Week.
The Page 69 Test: The Stager.
The Page 69 Test: Real Life and Other Fictions.
The Page 69 Test: The Literati.
The Page 69 Test: Word Salad.
Writers Read: Susan Coll.
--Marshal Zeringue
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