Just bought the Boyfriend a gift, inspired by his complaints that he has nothing to do in his free time and also by the fact he agreed to read a book of my choice if I ran a 5K this summer—which I did.
I purchased A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (Grove Weidenfeld 1987), recommended to me, somewhat ironically, by a boy a dated briefly a couple summers past. All I know about the Boyfriend’s taste in books is that he enjoyed 1984 by George Orwell, so I had thinking something more along the lines of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (which will probably always be one of my favorite books—I’m not sure why, but everything reminds me of it. I recently decided that one of the academic buildings on campus make me think of the abandoned museum in the novel, which has turned the one hideous building on campus into something magical and mysterious.) As I was walking through the mall’s Barnes & Noble, though, the brightly-colored cover of Dunces caught my eye and I pounced, clutching the novel in my hands. I turned it over to read the synopsis on the back, trying to remember the particularities of the story. Although I couldn’t fully remember the the plot (memories came back as I read the Amazon.com review just now), I remember having thoroughly enjoyed it, and felt, for no specific reason, that BF would enjoy it too.
Oddly enough, Dunces does just seem like a perfect gift for an intelligent guy who doesn’t read, and needs to be re-introduced to the joys of reading. It’s not too long, like most of the books I wanted him to read (A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe, anyone?) yet it was still clever. It screams “male!” to me, but I cannot pinpoint why that would be. Perhaps because the protagonist, if that word can even be applied, is a disgusting, overweight, anti-social man who lives at home with his mother. Most girls, (to be stereotypical for a moment, which I really shouldn’t be, seeing as I attend a women’s college and we try not to uphold such stereotypes), do not like reading about such creatures as Ignatius J. Reilly. That being said, I must be an exception. (Maybe that’s why I attend a women’s college.)
Either way, I stuck a baby blue bow on the cover and tucked in the two dollars I owe him, and told the Boyfriend that, “He better like it because I spent money on it… or else he’ll just have to sell in Amazon and not tell me.” (Joke, joke. I’m not actually that harsh.)
