Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Die! Die! Die!

Commentary to come later (I'm late! I'm late!), but I had to pass this along before I lost the link: it's a Lurlene McDaniel snark blog!

Her official Web page is here.

So, for the sake of context: anyone remember those Scholastic book order sheets we got in elementary school? Lurlene McDaniel had a book on there every month. They had titles like Too Young to Die, Baby Alicia is Dying, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep... you know, perfect for a fifth grader. All about various cancers, teenagers who needed transplants, teenagers living with terminal illnesses. And I became obsessed. My best friend and I couldn't get enough of them.

I would seek them out at used book sales, look for them on friends' book shelves, get stacks out of the library. And they were so, so wonderful in their horridness.

My parents still tease me about all my "dead-people" books. But, shh. If I see them, I'll still get them.

The last one I read was about a car accident, though. She really needs to stick with natural tragedies. Or maybe I need to stop reading them.

2 comments:

Danny said...

That's fantastic! Do you remember Stephanie Hicks, a.k.a. Puu, my "friend" from HS who came around a couple of times freshman year? The kind of weird girl with the really long hair? She was big into those books during HS.... I teased her a lot about it.... so this blog is great. :)

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of my phase of reading the stacks of old (1960-1980) Reader's Digests sitting around my grandmother's house, where the book selection was inevitably either about someone with cancer or a premature baby fighting for life (both usually losing). It gave me a very warped view of the world. I suppose this chick would have been right up my alley.