Recommended Reading When Your Battery Dies

There's nothing like a nonresponsive car...no lights, no nothing...on a day full of planned activities to bring you up short, is there? Creative swearing, while fun, does not solve the problem.

In the end, we can only be grateful that DieHard batteries are relatively cheap (compared to a new alternator), Sears is ubiquitous, and books are more fun than running errands anyway.

The book I buried myself in was
A Lion Among Men (The Wicked Years, Book 3). Book 3 tells the story of the Cowardly Lion, whose name happens to be Brrr.

Brrr is an outcast like Elphaba and Liir, but Brrr is difficult to warm up to. Really. He's not just flawed, but deliciously self-absorbed, smug, pompous, precious, the works. He's a self-pitying opportunist. His word means nothing. Maguire makes him worth reading about, though, with hilarious asides and descriptions that defy description. Here is an example, buried in the middle of the book, of an unimportant place:

The Wend Fallows...beautiful to no one but the stray hermit or mendicant. What streams there were flushed into the mighty Munchkin river, which fed Oz's largest lake, Restwater.

But--martyrs roasting on an open fire!--Wend Fallow was ugly as sin. A fuzzy sort of brown nap coated the hillsides, like a mold that has dried but refuses to stop clinging..."

Wonderful prose. Indulge yourself, before your battery dies, too.