If you read enough, you will undoubtedly come across some peculiar details. Sometimes they are meant to shock the reader, a confession that is unsettling in its singularity. Other times they reveal cultural differences, saying as much about social location as anything objective. For the most part, though, strange tidbits are part of the idiosyncrasies of books.
Here are five unusual moments I’ve encountered between the pages.
1.
The author is Steve Jobs’ oldest daughter, a result of a high school romance that never solidified. She was raised mainly by her mother in the shadow of her father’s privileged life. In one scene in this memoir, seven-year-old Lisa is visiting a house with a swimming pool. The occupants are a hippie couple with a child Lisa’s age. When Lisa walks in on the mother breastfeeding, she is encouraged to do it as well. Reluctantly, Lisa feeds off the strange woman. A police investigation follows.
2.
Iris is an identical twin with a mission: she needs to procreate before any of her siblings do. Their billionaire father fashioned his will after dynastic blood line rules. Her twin, Summer, has one upped her by marrying a widower with a baby. They are bent on giving him a sibling.
Summer calls Iris to tell her that her stepbaby is sick. Her baby boy is getting erections and they are a symptom of certain maladies. This sets up a dramatic plotline, but I will still file this under “Medical Facts I Didn’t Need To Know.”
3.
A mother of six, the author lost her husband in a freakish accident when a wave crashed on him at the beach and broke his neck. The pain and loss the family went through are the subject of this coping memoir.
Before all of that, the author was an Americorps teacher in a Texas border town. To keep childhood trauma at bay, she binge drank from one honky tonk to the next. She developed a habit of wearing a candy necklace when she went out, allowing bartenders to lean over and bite off a piece of candy in exchange for free beer. It’s a good metaphor for the childhood trauma she was burying, but in the current age, it gave me pause.
4.
In grad school I briefly studied Buddhism, including several works by the famed Thich Nhat Hanh. It was all a bit too nebulous for me.
This book is about the spiritual principles of eating. The author is a strict vegetarian, believing that the violence of slaughter is poisonous when ingested. He does consume some animal products, though, such as cow’s milk. However, he states that he doesn’t drink milk. Instead he chews it. I’m not deep enough to embrace this practice.
5.
I first read this book as a teenager, unaware that it was a fictional retelling of the famous Johnny Stompanato case. It all seemed so fresh to an unjaded eye.
Rereading it more recently, I was struck by its old-fashioned qualities. The protagonist, Luke, is awoken in the night with the news that his teenage daughter has stabbed her mother’s lover. Luke’s current wife, who is eight months’ pregnant, drives him to the airport for a red-eye to San Francisco. They take a seat in the bar, lighting up cigarettes and drinking Manhattans as they wait for his gate to be called. That’s both of them: man and heavily pregnant wife. The swinging ’60s have new meaning to me now.
Books Smitten 