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Forgotten Arm

Josh Hinkle

Books. It’s why I’m here. I read ‘em, I love ‘em, I cannot live without ‘em. Hopefully you’ll like books. Or if not, maybe you’ll like what I write about books. And if not that, either, maybe you’ll like some of the other nonsense I’m going to write about. See, originally this was going to be a column about the books I bought and read over the past week, month, whatever. But sitting down to write about all of it, I started to think to book reviews I’ve read and loved or even remembered. Guess what I came up with? Absolutely nothing. Not. A. Thing. I can’t recall one time I’ve read a book review and had to go read the book based on what I had just read. And I read a lot. I’ve bought books recommended to me by friends, or strangers I’ve had a conversation with at the book store, or relatives (although now that I think about it, my family doesn’t really read much of anything. Which makes me think… if I was lucky enough to get a book published would they read that? Probably not something I want to think about for too long. Depressing, kind of). You know, people you can talk to, and I mean TALK to. Not someone spouting off about the themes of Moby Dick and Frankenstein, sounding like a pretentious know-it-all, or even worse, getting paid to tell you to go buy a book. I base book recommendations on what I think of the person doing the recommending. You know what I’m talking about here too. A nice, fun guy highly recommends a book, you’ll be more likely to check it out. Or even better yet, a nice, funny, pretty girl. You couldn’t spend the money fast enough in that case. But if the math major recommends you read a book on global economics, well you know where I’m going with this one. Unless you’re a math major. Or a global economist. Or maybe you just like really bad books. In a nutshell what I’m going to try to do with this is not just bore people with dry, academic recitations of the literary themes, character and world development, allusions, metaphor, blah, blah, blah. There will be some of that in there, but I’m going to stay away from it as much as possible and instead I’m going to try to make this more of a conversational piece than a pulpit. Maybe something where you can read it, get a little insight into who I am and then, if you really feel like you should, go and check out a book I’ve talked about. Next Week:  Be here as I discuss an ACTUAL BOOK!