"Picture a magical, sugar-fueled road trip with Willy Wonka behind the wheel and David Sedaris riding shotgun, complete with chocolate-stained roadmaps and the colorful confetti of spent candy wrappers flying in your cocoa powder dust."I like ice cream more than I care to admit. My husband and I once traveled 3 hours for an all-you-can-eat ice cream fair. Is it just me, or should Ben and Jerry change the label on the back of their cartons from 4 to 1? For anybody else who loves something more than you should, find solace in Steve Almond.
Almond is an unabashed, aptly named candy freak. This guy loves candy more than I love ice cream. We accompany him on a trek across the country to discover what happened to some of his beloved candies of yesteryear (do Goo Goo Clusters or Idaho Spuds ring a bell?) Even though you may not all crave candy, you will admire and even relate to Almond's passion.
Compared to recent Book Worm Club selections, this is a lightweight. Perfect in time for some fun summer reading, right? I garauntee at least a few laughs and a craving for a piece of chocolate.
3 comments:
I am a self-proclaimed candy freak so I'm looking forward to it. I hope it doesn't spawn any more candy cravings than I already have. And I just finished off my last Hot Tamale last night...darn it.
This is the first time I have read one of the Book Worm Book Club picks, so I am not quite sure how the commenting works. I realize that no questions have been posted for this book yet, but there was an uncanny connection to our own lives in one particular passage that I thought I would point out.
At the beginning of Chapter 8 Almond spends some time describing some of the sucrose-induced daydreams that he had as a child. In one of them, he mentions, “someone (a charitable foundation underwritten by the American Dental Association perhaps) would pay for me to take a coast-to-coast trip with stops at every candy company along the way.” This brought to memory a plan suggested to me by our very own Skidz, that a group of us convince the Pizza Pipeline corporate office to send us on a road trip from Texas to Oregon with stops at every Pizza Pipeline along the way. The only real differences between these two daydreams was the type of junk food to be consumed and the fact that in Skidz’ dream, people would be lining the streets and cheering us on at every stop like Patton’s 3rd Army was rolling in to town.
You might ask yourself, “But why would people care that a bunch of single, male college students were driving around in a crappy van eating a bunch of pizza?” You are thinking too much.
I think that “Pipeline Freak” might be too tame a word for it.
James, when we visit you in Hawaii I promise to carry Pipeline on the plane with me for you. I promise.
I also think I should drive to Corvallis this week . . . mmmmm . . .
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