Monstro's got fewer than 10 items left to read/view for his comps. I'm balancing out all his scholastic reading by reading, well, in my family we like to call it beach trash. Two of the books I just bought were of this ilk.

The first, Butterfly, I read while I was in college. I remembered it fondly, so I chose it as my “free” option (buy two, get one free at Cherry Picked Books). Read it over one evening and the next morning. Just as trashy as I remembered, and trés 80s — the main bad guy is a hypocritical televangelist. Oh, and there's a fantasy bordello that caters to straight women. Good stuff.

The second, Elegance, was not so much beach trash as chick-lit, a genre I haven't plumbed because most of the books in its ilk are so gawd-awful. This one started with an interesting premise — unfulfilled newlywed adopts a secondhand tome on elegance as her Bible — and I bought it because the secondhand book in the book I bought (confusing, sorry) actually exists in real life. But halfway through the book, with no warning, the main character casts Elegance aside for no reason. The story unraveled at that point (ok, maybe a little before that point), so I just read each chapter as its own short story. Finished it the same night I started it.

Before I went to bed I cracked the Campbell Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake and have learned more about FW in four pages than I did from 150 pages of the source material. I'm thinking it was a good investment.

And now? I need to finish reading my workbook chapter for tonight's Bible study!