Breaking Amazon

If you don't get your order in time for Christmas, it'll be my fault. I broke Amazon.

First I broke my cheapo immersion blender. It came all to pieces in the sweet potato hummus, which really needs more lemon juice and garlic than the recipe said.

So I ordered a tiny tot food processor. Then I ordered eight little stocking stuffers for a work gift exchange. Jeff Bezos thought it would be fun to combine the two orders in one very oversized packing box with a lot of bubble wrap. After bouncing back and forth a few times between Phoenix and Louisville, a delivery person managed to wedge the box into the Amazon hub locker in my neighborhood by crushing it a bit. 

I could not budge the box to slide it out of the locker. So I ripped the visible end of the box apart to pull out my orders and a bunch of bubble wrap. Stuffed the bubble wrap back into the mangled box and slammed the locker shut. The touch pad screen for the locker hub started freaking out. It kept telling me in larger fonts to reenter my code and remove the contents of the locker. 

So, if I can't bring down the whole grid, at least I can break Amazon! Sorry about your late order...

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Long, strange book trips

We joke that the library has the World's Largest Collection of Travel Guides, like it should be a giant ball of string or maybe Wall Drug. We've got your Fodors,  Frommers, and Rick Steves, Insight and Eyewitness, National Geographic and Lonely Planet, Michelin and Off the Beaten Path.  We've got at least a hundred places you must golf before you die. We are branching out into Falcon Guides for hiking , biking, and waterfalls. Whether you are into glamping or food trucks, we probably have your guide.

2020 was unfortunately the year of no travel. True, my buddy kept her Jeep filled up just in case Texas did something so incredibly embarrassing she had to drive off toward the horizon. This being a frequent occurrence, just saying.

Of the four long, strange trip books I read this year, the standout is Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder, by Kent Nerburn (the 25th anniversary edition). A white writer is challenged with telling the story of a Lakota elder. How do these two learn to trust and listen to each other, and preserve the story for future generations? How can spirituality bring healing to both? By driving an ancient car off-road in the South Dakota Badlands. 

Out of Darkness, Shining Light tells how the African expedition leaders and slaves enabling Dr. David Livingstone to search for the source of the Nile carried his body 1,500 miles from the interior of the African continent to the east coast so he could be buried in his homeland. They also carried the doctor's expedition journals. The heavily researched novel considers colonialism from the Africans' viewpoint through the voice of an outspoken slave cook and road wife, and a pompous freed slave educated by Christian missionaries. Recommended by Nancy Pearl.

The Last Great Road Bum: a Novel, by Hector Tobar is an experiment that doesn't quite work, but has some good spots along the journey. It is the very Sixties tale of a real person, Joe Sanderson of Urbana, Illinois, who did a great deal of no-budget traveling, writing letters and diaries for a great road bum novel, without ever managing to learn much in the process. Tobar discovered the real diaries and in the course of his fictionalizing them the nonfiction Sanderson keeps interrupting.

Sometimes I just like the book jacket! Natural History, by Carlos Fonseca, is an even more complex experiment. Again a writer is given a packet of letters and notes, and embarks on geographical and philosophical journeys in search of truth or reality, or camouflaged butterflies and masked revolutionary guerrilla leaders. I didn't understand it, but it was appropriately surreal reading for the Covid shutdown. Oh, and there's a famous fashion designer with a mysterious disease.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Nominees in the Exploding Reptiles Fiction category

No year in my memory, at least not since I escaped Millard Lefler Junior High, has needed ravenous, swamp dwelling fictional reptiles like this one, 2020. 

Snakes, dragons, and alligators remind this reader that irreverent humor and satire are essential to good mental health in this messed up moment. Still, keep wearing your mask and using vodka hand sanitizer. And remember, next to bleach injections, laughter  is the best medicine.

Squeeze Me, by Carl Hiaasen:  Skink, the former governor of Florida, hides out from the world in the Florida swamp just a bit down the road from the POTUS golf course. Enter a female wildlife relocation expert and very hungry pythons.

Highfire, by Eoin Colfer:  Vern, the last-of-his-kind fairy tale dragon hides out from the world in the  Louisiana bayou bingeing on Netflix. Enter a crooked sheriff, and let the airboats explode.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder