Literacy and Longing in L. A. Read Online Free

voice is punctuated with expletives like “asshole” and “fuck you.” Such a demeanor is particularly jarring in a setting like McKenzie’s, but her coworkers clearly regard her with respect, and I’ve heard she knows every female writer who has written anything of note in the last two hundred years.
    I can’t tell if this fetching social misfit has rebellion on her mind or she just doesn’t want to reveal how adorable she is beneath all that black smudged kohl and bare skin. This girl definitely has a past, but she giggles like a kid with a wad of Bazooka in her mouth, and it is hard not to follow her around with my eyes. If she asked my opinion, I’d tell her to comb her hair, but that would probably be it. Her hair is the only thing that bothers me, oddly enough. I guess it’s “the look,” but it’s all messy and tangled in teased, rat’s-nest clumps and soft, mushy, waddedfluff. It seems as if she has purposely gelled it to have the appearance of “I just slept in a Greyhound bus station and was attacked by a band of homeless men who clawed at my clothes and completely ruined my hair.” You couldn’t get a comb through it if you tried, and then it would be an extremely painful process.
    Maybe that’s the point that girls like Sara are tacitly addressing. Hair is beside the point—a time-consuming, unfulfilling way to go off on another fucking tangent, rather than getting on with your life, which leads me right back to where I am at the moment, roaming around the bookstore on a dead afternoon wondering how to approach Fred.
    He is now busy with a frazzled-looking businessman who asks in a tense voice where the CliffsNotes section is located. Fred points toward the rear of the store and then asks him, “Which book?”
    “
The Scarlet Letter,
” the man replies. “My kid’s hysterical. He just wrote a five-page paper and then somehow deleted it and it’s due tomorrow.”
    Sara gives the guy a commiserating look. “Tell your son that Thomas Carlyle gave his only copy of
The French Revolution
to his friend to read and the guy’s maid thought it was garbage and lit the fire with it. Carlyle had a few rotten nights, but then he wrote the thing all over again.”
    Fred looks at her in amusement. “Sara, I’m sure that’s going to make the kid feel much better.”
    Then he turns to me and smiles. “Oh, hey, how are you? What can I help you with today?”
    The first thing that pops into my head is that he recognizes me. The second thing is that the man who barbecued Carlyle’s manuscript was the writer and critic John Stuart Mill, and he ended up giving the book a rave review. However, instead of belaboring the point, I consider telling him I’ve just finished a 675-page historical thriller on seventeenth-century Oxford, England, by Iain Pears called
An Instance of the Fingerpost
and that I have been totally unsuccessful in getting anyone else in my life to read it. The book is a kind of Dickensian whodunit set in Restoration England that begins with an unexplained death in a small college town and builds up into a revelation that has to do with grand events in England and the world. It is intellectual, original, and chock-full of smoke and mirrors, but, unfortunately, has quotes by Cicero and Francis Bacon in the beginning, which definitely put off several of my less esoteric friends. It also has a cast of twenty-seven characters in the back that went on for several pages and includes names like Charles II, Christopher Wren, and John Locke. Even the name of the novel seems to be a deterrent, although I once explained to my sister that the title was a delicious part of the whole mystery.
    “Delicious?” she sniffed. She actually was somewhat interested until I told her that the narrator seems clear-minded and sympathetic at first, until three hundred or so pages later when you learn that he’s fucking bonkers and is writing from the seventeenth-century English version of the booby hatch. She