The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump

This book by Rob Sears is an absolute gem. Extracts from those endlessly articulate, baffling and mental-gymnastical goldmines of the mind of its 'author', be these speeches, tweets, or just things he's said on TV or in interviews or whatever - are lovingly chopped up and reconstituted into really quite tremendous poetic formats. The net result is fucken hilarious - made moreso by the diligent referencing of each quote-snippet so we can fact-check each and every word, phrase & ramble just in case one wanted to make sure Sears wasn't crafting all these himself and we, the readers, could truly trust that what we read here are indeed very much the words of the man himself - and while he maybe didn't put those particular bits of words into those particular orders, the resultant poems are deeply and beautifully emulative of Trump's truest and biggest public persona, with all its nuance & complexity, all its humbly-acknowledged flaws & profound reflective wisdom. Seriously - a book worth engrossment for any who perhaps have not seen the quieter meditative side to our current Excellent President, as this book will enlighten as much as entertain.

the Incredible Book Eating Boy

This book by Oliver Jeffers was presented to me recently by my dad recently, with the accompanying snide remark "it's about you". Keen to disprove him, I read it in a short sitting this evening, only finding before I wrote this I had to text him to confirm his initial comment. You don't care about such biographical rambling, I'm sure.

   Anyway, it's a story (with chunky cool stylised illustrations, and the version I've got has a range of innovative pop-up sections, which no doubt younger readers might find even more exciting than I did) about a boy called Henry who starts eating books, develops a taste for them, tries to eat as many books as he can because he wants to be the smartest boy ever, gets sick, slows down his eating habits, and discovers he enjoys reading rather than eating the books.

   So back to the abstruse bio-commentary - it's not really about me, because I've never eaten a book. Nor do I (any longer - though for a period in my late teens and early student days this was certainly a fair cop) feel there is much point trying to read as much as possible to try to be a particular kind of cleverer or better. I read to broaden my horizons bit by bit in all manner of ways, generally quite a lot slower than followers of this blog might expect. I think maybe then it is about me anyway, only I'm at a stage of life where I've already learnt the lesson Henry concludes this plot with; reading is great, don't go mad. A good one for the budding bibliomaniac kids.