i expect there will be no quibbling when i assert that the best book title since gutenberg is i am a genius of unspeakable evil and i want to be your class president. and the book of which that is the title - which i'm reading to jane - actually pays off. matter of fact the volume also has the best first sentence in the history of publishing: "Someday you will beg for the honor of licking my feet."
the persona of the seventh-grade, pudgy genius permits the author - josh lieb - to do many little transgressive things. as an example, he's an extremely sharp critic of the literary material being shoved his way by his pathetic teachers, e.g. fahrenheit 451:
Actually, I read the book when I was two. And even then I knew it was regurgitated bird pap, fit only for morons and seventh graders. In case you're lucky enough to have escaped it, Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that is about how amazing books are and how wonderful the people who write books are. Writers love writing books like this, and for some reason, we let them get away with it. It's like someone producing a TV show called TV Shows are the Best and the People Who Make Them are Geniuses. [footnote 2: Probably the name of Aaron Sorkin's next project.]
or
The hot sandwich that greets me when I get home is perhaps the highlight of my day. It's "A Small, Good Thing." [footnote 15: To quote the title of an awful short story. Why do people insist on ranking it among Carver's best work? It's a perfect showcase for everything that's wrong with his fiction.]
