This little free library sucks and is also free
I tip my hat to you, little free library, for being the place where people offload printed materials they deem too good for the recycle bin but not quite worth a trip to Goodwill.
I’ll occasionally be sharing brand new humor pieces in this newsletter, as a treat.
Here I am at the little free library in my neighborhood and boy I’m here to tell you it sucks. But it is also free.
I was hoping to get my mitts on some outdated Reader’s Digests that are also slightly water damaged and it looks like I’ve come to the right place. I tip my hat to you, little free library, for being the place where people offload printed materials they deem too good for the recycle bin but not quite worth a trip to Goodwill.
Where else would I be able to peruse a range of children’s books from the previous century that theoretically celebrate child empowerment while also doubling down on gender and racial stereotypes in such whimsical ways? Misogyny and racism are timeless, of course, and always on the house.
What’s this now? A romance novel with a seemingly chaste title that will catch the eye of an innocent 12-year-old bookworm who has no idea what she’s in for on the crotch-feelings front, and all from a slightly worked-over free neighborhood book of all things? Talk about putting the service in community service, that’s what he said.
This little free library is also quite the one-stop shop for thematically interrelated self-help books with a potentially tantalizing provenance, featuring titles that allow my mind to spiral. Which exact, specific neighbors left them here? Who loves too much? Which one is from Venus? And who, then, is from Mars? Just look at these pages that are dog-eared and then hastily un-dog-eared pre-donation as if to disguise that, yes, on this page, is where you found yourself. Maybe I will find you too, neighbor. I hope you are the one who loves too much because I am not interested in being a planet whatsoever.
Oh look! The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger! I’ve always wanted to read that book but wanted to wait no fewer than twenty years to do so. It was also important to me to hold off until it was a major motion picture, a common cultural expression, and devoid of anything left for me to discover.
Wow. Ok. I see everyone’s too good for that Doonesbury book I brought down at the beginning of summer. Jeez, sorry if everyone around here can’t vibe with cutting edge political and cultural commentary that was relevant only 44 years ago. Some gratis community service this is!
I honestly can’t believe I have to wade through this arbitrary selection of books that is utterly lacking in bestselling new fiction, any sort of sensible arrangement of topics, and is also completely available to me in a convenient location for absolutely no charge whatsoever.
Anyway, since I’m here, I think I’ll jam in my copy of Whip Smart by Melissa Febos — “a powerful memoir about a young woman’s transformation from college student to professional dominatrix” — just for chaos. In exchange I will take this manual for a 1993 Volvo 940.
Speaking of chaos, looks like these parenting books are broken based on the behavior of all the brats in this neighborhood. I’m going to write a parenting book about how children shouldn’t whimsically discriminate but instead pursue a life of patriarchy-based self-help, tinker with antique Swedish cars, and whatever the verb is for becoming a dominatrix. Look for it on the shelves of this little free library with exactly one-third of the pages torn out, sometime around 2036.
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