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Light inscense and start a book. When he came home it was time for lip gloss and the first in a string of a thousand “I love yous.”

This sheer meaninglessness, is one of the key overarching themes of Sophie’s Choice. It’s a book that seems frequently to yearn towards meaning and yet has strong undercurrents of nihilism.

And holy shit if this book had ended right there, I’d be writing a very different review right now. The vibrancy of their early relationship with each other, the slow creep of horror as things become more and more wrong in the Kagwa-Valentine household, the awful question of whether Emma might actually be right, the visceral brutality of the final scenes… It works. It’s good.

Male writers please take note, you really do not need to describe the shape and relative perkiness of the breasts of every woman who appears in your book. In fact, in most cases you need to describe the breasts of none of the women who appear in your book. I have no recollection of what color hair most of these women were supposed to have, but I can tell you they’ve pretty much all got perky tits.

It’s a free country, right? It’s a free country, right?
I can do whatever I want, be whatever I want,
say whatever I want, shoot whomever I want,
live wherever I want, die however I want.
It’s a free country, right? It’s a free country, right?

This too is important: skip ahead a little, or just read the ending and find a way to live with yourself about it, but for godsakes. Give yourself permission to quit a book. If after 40 or 50 pages you are slogging thru, put it down. Do it for yourself but also because it needs to be done.

Here at The Ape, in addition to slapping our over-sized monkey paws on keyboards to bring you daily food for thought, fiction, poetry and general reading material for your work bathroom breaks (do they notice that you always bring your phone into the toilet?) our contributors also write books. Like whole books to read or to purchase as gifts around the holidays for the unsuspecting family member.

One day I woke up and realized I really knew zilch-all about our seminal founding father. Really. Somebody needed to give that Cherry tree story the ax. I realized that somebody had to be me.