This morning I finished reading a book titled “The Lies I tell” by Julie Clark. I opened GrumpaJoesPlace on WordPress to log the book into my booklist page. Surprise, surprise, my list has been corrupted. Some electronic gremlin has removed all of my 2022 reads and two thirds of my 2021 reads. No one ever looks at this list, except me. I use it to refer books I have read to friends. The page serves as a history of my reading. I show the title, author, the type of reading it is, such as fiction, history, etc. and my rating. Usually, if I like a book I give it five stars. I’ve noticed that many non-fiction books only have two or three stars. It tells me that I’d rather read stories than factual accounts. After fiction my next favorite class is history or historical fiction.
I’ve contacted the happiness engineers at Word Press to help me restore this file. I was able to locate a back up which has 28 entries for 2022. I read a book a week, and at this point I should be on number thirty, this back-up is not too far away. The good thing is I found the back up, the bad thing is I am too stupid to know how to actually restore it to the Blog site.
A few years ago, our library dumped the Dewey Decimal system of classifying books. I complained bitterly to the director, but my voice rolled off like water from a duck’s back. I had to join the modern age of computers they said. Since then I notice that the books come with a label that classifies the type of reading it is. Hmmm, it finally sunk in that putting books on shelves at random would only cause chaos. The moderns have finally realized that even computers need some classification scheme to help them locate material. Dumping Dewey has made it easier for library staff to shelve books. Shelving by a simple class and the author alphabetically removes the strain caused by trying to determine decimally which slot a particular volume fits into. Anyway, I have joined the moderns and have accepted their new system, I had no other choice.
I’ll end with a short synopsis of The Lies I Tell. Although it is fiction, it has to be based on history because the author has told a story about a lady conman with such detail that it had to be taken from an actual source. The principle character in this tale is a young lady who becomes homeless because her dying mother was desperate for funds, and fell prey to a man who stole her savings and her home, then evicted her and her grammar school kid. Mother and daughter wound up living out of their car. The mother dies and the daughter is left to her own choices, she chose to become a grifter. The story held my interest throughout simply because of the uniqueness of this grifter’s style. Her motives for selecting marks made me think of Robin Hood who stole from the rich so he could give to the poor. She picked on men who take advantage of women. She did it in a way that kept them from getting police involved. This is a five star read.
Filed under: Biography, Book Review, family | Tagged: addiction, Dewey Decimal System, Homelssness, Revenge, Scams | Leave a comment »
