Review: The best book I've read in 2012
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 20, 2012
"Someone said we should really be judged by how we act when we think no one is looking. Can anyone say they are good? Maybe WE are the devil..."I wish I could tell you that whenever I read a book, it's hard for me to put the book down. Unfortunately, I can't tell you that. Many of the books I start, I don't finish. At my age, if a book doesn't grab me by page 50, I'm done with it.100 Unfortunate Days not only grabbed me, it pushed me down and held me down. It is, by far, the best book I've read in 2012.Penelope Crowe takes us through a 100 day, first person, brutally honest journey."And now we have diseases that can't be cured with antibiotics--super-bugs that are going to kill us like before we had antibiotics. It's just a matter of time. Soon the drive-thru eye operations will enable us to see better than before--maybe better than anyone has ever seen. We will have x-ray vision that allows us to see into the souls of others. We will be able to know who is filled with poison and who is not. Then we can get rid of all the people that are toxic and we won't ever have to worry about them again."This appears in Day 3. I'm not perfect. I can be downright evil at times. But I can admit it. Can you?"Even if you don't figure out what's wrong, it never ever, ever, ever stops. You wake up again and again and you wonder if the jail time for murder would be worth it. But oh, the baby is so adorable! The most beautiful thing anyone has ever seen--and it is. And your husband can't figure why you are such an idiot. Why can't you like this like everyone else? The baby is perfect and healthy and beautiful and you should be ashamed of yourself. And you are. You are. You are. And now every hour seems like five hours and you do anything to get through the day."It's passages like these, frank and in-your-face, that make this book so brilliant."I heard that you cannot feel pain during an orgasm, and I told my friend. He didn't believe me, and we argued a little, and then he had sex with his girlfriend, even though he wanted to have sex with me, and he told her to stick him with a pin when he started to come. She did and he told me it hurt so much."Revenge feels good. You know it does."Demons blind you against what is right and make you not really care about anything after a while. You will be able to make excuses for yourself for just about anything."As Penelope reveals the demons, she forces us to confront our own. On the one hand, I want to hug Penelope for doing this. On the other hand, I'm afraid she would put a spider in my soup if she were ever mad at me. That's how honest this book is. We need honest books. We need books that cut to the chase and bypass the crap. I'm sick of the crap. I've been sick of the crap for a long time.By the way, Penelope doesn't always follow grammar rules, and if you care, you're missing the forest for the trees.Thank you, Penelope, for a brilliant book.Please note: Some of her excellent drawings appear in the book. (In fact, I won one during a blog hop. I'll be displaying it up at our summer cottage.) However, you'll barely notice the drawings. The writing is too good to focus on those.