Miss Misery

I was looking at my Amazon recommendations this morning and apart from a huge chunk of Jill Mansell books, (I haven’t read any, but they look like fun and I don’t want to knock any off the list until I’ve tried one. I don’t know what happens to the books I wipe off my recommendation list, but I feel bad for them when I push the “not interested” button and I worry that I might be sorry I’ve rejected them. This is also why I have so many people on my eHarmony list who I will never, ever contact, but I can’t seem to delete.  Unless they list “working out” as a hobby. Dude is dead to me. And back to the anywho.) apart from the Mansell books, most of my recommendations are for those books with the fuzzy picture of a lady’s head or fuzzy pictures of people’s backs with the beach in the background. I don’t know what I’ve ordered that made Amazon so sure that I no longer wanted to see people’s faces or why think that I think it is okay for people to be so fuzzy all the time, but those books do not look like any fun at all.

Those fuzzy faceless people look like they are having miserable times. They have lost children and husbands and houses. They have just had to come back to their childhood homes and reconcile with their aging parents who were never accepting of their choices, but will soften in old age to at least explain why. It is possible, from the proliferation of book covers showing people from behind (of course) and from the neck down, that they have had horrible injuries at the businesses they lost before they had to move in with their aged parents. It is hard to find love when you are a headless torso, y’all. And they do all want to find love. A quiet, depressing sort of love, where everyone understands that the bottom can fall out at any time and you could wind up headless and fuzzy.

And just like the slag heap on my eHarmony site, I’m sure there are diamonds in the pile. If I tried to describe the plot of my actual, truly, not-even-faking-for-the-book-club-and-the-cleaning-lady favorite book Pride and Prejudice, it would sound a lot like a book with two fuzzy back-of-heads, one blond and one brunette. And I think one edition I have actually does have just a headless torso to show the dress style of the period. But Pride and Prejudice is hilarious. I don’t know if you’ve read it, or just seen the movies, (Skip the Keira Knightley version. She’s great and all, but Jennifer Ehle's  is outstanding and I can’t even remember who played Darcy in Keira’s version and we all remember Colin Firth coming out of that lake and now I have to go fan myself some. Yum.) It’s a genuinely funny book, where life can go wrong, but it’s okay to keep laughing. Gallows humor is better than po-face anytime.

I don’t have a solution for weeding the not-even-a-little fun books out of my recommendation piles, but I think I may just clean sweep them and look them up if I get a great recommendation.  I may do the same thing at eHarmony, too. Sorry, Paul who lives 300 miles away and lists oxygen and water as things he can’t live without – If you ever find a girl who thinks that is clever, you snatch her up and never let go.