on books and what might have been

so, i’m reading sex, drugs & cocoa puffs by chuck klosterman and i’m thinking that he sounds like he’s talking about my life experiences with media and whatnot. he makes mention of being thirty years old and being eight in 1980 and, because i’m such the math wiz, i deduce he was born in 1972, just like me. as i keep reading the book, and i’m totally getting a crush on this guy i’ve never heard of before sean gave me his book to read, i decide i need to know just how near in age we are. according to wikipedia, we were actually born two days apart, with me being the elder. it started to freak out a little when i read that ’cause it’s really like reading my life in some ways and to know that it’s coming from this person who was born before my parents even got to take me home from the hospital is kind of freaky, yet very cool.
it’s the same sensation i got while reading girlfriend in a coma by douglas coupland. it was set where i grew up, just a couple of years before i would have been doing all the things the characters were doing. reading how someone else lived what could have been (and sometimes was) your life is both disconcerting and very cool. it’s almost a glimpse down the path not taken. if i’d been cooler or more aware of things would i have been the one to put it all together and make a book which affected people this way?
in other bookish news, the last book i read was the worst book i’ve ever read. saying this shouldn’t be taken lightly, either. i read a lot of harlequin romances in the early nineties, so i know bad books. it’s called in search of an impotent man by gaby hauptmann. it’s about a beautiful, intelligent, sexy, well-adjusted, successful woman in her 30’s who’s oh-so tired of meeting men who are only after one thing (that’s sex, just in case you were wondering), so she puts an ad in the local paper looking for an intelligent man who can’t get his willie up. you’d think hilarity would ensue, but it was just a lot of “don’t hate me because i’m beautiful” schlock and THE WORLD’S STUPIDEST ENDING EVER. ohmygod. all this was on top of the glaring realization that it’s either a translation from german or ms. hauptmann skipped a few too many english classes during Gymnasium because the language is so horribly stilted and just plain uncomfortable to read. no one, not even germans, talk like her characters. ugh. i was so very upset with it i couldn’t put it down. don’t you hate it when that happens?