A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Book Reviews!.

Emelita and I have this standing date every three weeks. Every third Sunday, she attends my yoga class and then we meet at Border’s Books to read as much of one book as we can in one sitting. We take turns picking the book. We take turns ordering tea by the pot. Last Sunday, it was her turn to pick. She picked Christopher Moore‘s A Dirty Job.
Wow! I feel the way I did when I was eleven and read the first of L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series, or at sixteen when I read my first Robbin’s novel, Still Life With Woodpecker. I read all the time, always more than one book at a time, but only occasionally do I fall this hard, I’ve-got-to-read-everything-this-person-has-in-print hard.
So, I’ve finished A Dirty Job, a book with craft about a junk dealer who loses his wife after the birth of their first child and that gets seriously zany from there. It’s a story about reconciling the beauty of the world with the inevitability, sometimes seeming cruelty, of death. Charlie Asher, our hero, discovers that having the courage to face death despite risk is how to live victorious over death, something that few souls accomplish, and certainly not in one lifetime. The opening line of the novel sets the reader up for chapter after chapter of killer opening lines: “Charlie Asher walked the earth like an ant walks on the surface of water, as if the slightest misstep might send him plummeting through the surface to be sucked to the depths below.”
I’m reading Bloodsucking Fiends next so that in three weeks, Emelita and I can read You Suck at our iheartreading ceremony. (That’s the only book by Moore she hasn’t already read. )

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.