I don’t know the history of this book or even how we came to own it. The only thing I know about the book is that Bonnie’s niece borrowed it once. Then the little tart returned it in this sorry state. It wasn’t in mint condition when she took it but for fucks sake… So it’s sat on our shelves for years and years. I’ve largely avoided it until now to avoid making it any worse than it already is. Plus I had a slew of other books to read making this sad, old, broken one less of a priority.

Why Did I Have So Many Other Books To Read?

About 10 years ago we discovered the marvelous and exciting world of estate sales. We would spend every weekend in strange houses slowly pursuing the effects of the dead. It’s really quite thrilling actually, to be some of the last people to see the way a total stranger lived before their house is flipped and their remaining possessions unceremoniously discarded.

I always found it interesting to see how many people moved into homes in the 1960s and 1970s, decorated them with the latest styles, and then never touched them again. 50 years later the house is a time capsule save for the odd room with boring beige carpet installed after a flood in the 80s or 90s. It’s such an interesting thing to me; to make home decor such a priority and then never revisit it again until the day you die.

Anyway, estate sales are replete with books. Very often you can find the old classics which I never read. I was a terrible student in school and I never read the required reading. I skimmed the book, bought the Clifsnotes at the last minute and B.S.’d my way throght the test. Judge me if you will bit it worked for me. No, that’s total bullshit, it didn’t work for me at all. But now that I’m older I really want to fill in that part of my education. So when I would find an old classic at an estate sale I would buy it. After a few years I had quite a collection of books sitting on the shelf in my closet and everytime I would add another I would say, someday I’m going to get around to reading all these.

Someday 🙄

That “someday” was in early 2018. And I swore that I would not buy, or even read another book that did not come from that shelf. One-by-one I would pull a book off the shelf, read it and throw it away. Not really. I would actually put it in our little library. (We have a little library in our front yard.)

Slowly, over the next couple of years, I would make my way through the pile. Some of the books were quite good. I particularly liked To Kill A Mockingbird, Never Let Me Go, and Great Expectations but everything else that Dickens did was total shit. I read a book by Jules Vern called The Mysterious Island. It was so fucking weird that if they made it into a film it would be an instant cult classic. But generally, I think that most of the so-called “classics” are just awful.

My Misadventure with Huckleberry Finn

One of the few books I actually read in high school was The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin. I liked the book so much that I didn’t return it at the end of the year. I kept it, always planning to read it again someday. For over 20 years I held onto that book and the memory of how much I enjoyed it. When I finally revisited Huck and Jim I realized what a miserable piece of shit that book is.

First of all, it’s like trying to read a foreign language. Or actually, it’s more like trying to talk to a customer who speaks very poor English. You need to know what they’re trying to tell you so you’re concentrating really, really hard to make out their words. It’s just so hard to understand what they’re saying but you can’t just smile and nod and walk away because you have a job to do. He wrote the whole book that way. I’m not sure what was worse, the southern accents or the books ending. I think Twain spent so much time and energy writing this book in some kind of code that he ran out and had to phone in the ending.

A Quarantine Book List Deserving of A Global Pandemic

My quarantine reading list was almost as bad. I started out with Moby Dick. (Does a worse book exist?) I could have tolerated, and even really got into it if it wasn’t for the highly erroneous cetology lessons in every other fucking chapter. Then I moved into The Illiad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, As You Like It, Macbeth, and The Canterbury Tales. By August I had had all of the “wherefore’s” and “hither’s” and “thou’s” that I could take. I needed a break from antiquity; I needed something written by someone who lived in my lifetime and the only book left on the shelf that fit the bill was the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It was a welcomed change of pace. Of course it hit me differently now, than when I read it 20 years ago. This time it just reminded me of how much I hate drug people.

Now That You’re Up To Speed…

But after the acid test, there was just one book left on the shelf. This poor beat up and broken old book. It’s by Edgar Allen Poe. I knew it wouldn’t make it through a reading so it was going to have to be fixed. Recently, I happened to come across an old suede skirt that would be the perfect material to mend the binding. I cut it to size and used Titebond Quick & Thick Multi-Surface Glue to adhere the leather to the book cover. Now it’s as good as new, except for the story that is. The Story is shit. It seems to be little more than Poe’s stream of consciousness about god knows what. It’s just one-half step above listening to someone recall the dream they had last night.

So I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I spent a little bit of time and effort to fix a shitty book before I read it and knew that it was shitty. And also that most broken books probably aren’t worth saving. You can watch a video of it down below.