Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Attached to "Attachments" Part 1

My favourite book thus far this year: the one I  keep returning to and the one I, well, basically underlined every other sentence in and the one YOU ALL NEED TO GO AND BUY NOW is Attachments by Rainbow Rowell. Yes, yes, the Rainbow Rowell who is on TWITTER (@rainbowrowell)and who I was fortunate enough to banter about Fifty Shades of That Book with.

Buy ye, Buy ye, Buy ye this book!
happiness in book form


Dear God in Heaven and all the Skippy Squirrels; this is the kind of book that warms you down to your toes.  This book gives you that "Horatio Lyle" feeling, this book makes you prance around your apartment singing the few happy Carpenter songs at the top of your lungs while pirouetting.  This book is sheer LOVE.

This book put me in a daze; so days later I was still seeing everything at work, at home, at the grocery store, at the gym through rose-coloured glasses and sighing: " Lincoln"  ---over-and-over again like a wispy little prayer. EGADS! Major. Book. Crush.

Ugh, I don't want to waste time and ode on the plot; because this book is so much more than PLOT (it is character and structure and sunshine and jelly beans and happy bunnies and beautiful sentences: a tapestry of interwoven giggles and stars); but the gist is this:  It is set in the days preluding Y2K at a newspaper office. Jennifer and Beth, both columnists, tap-tap-tap emails to each other all day long: about love, sex, Ghostbusters, the usual.   Meanwhile, Lincoln has been hired to read through all employee emails and flag anything that might go against company policy, that might not have ANYTHING to do with the Newspaper at all. Basically, all of Jennifer and Beth's emails.  But Lincoln, dear, sweet, wish-you-were-here-Colin-Morgan, Lincoln reads every night through his night shift. He is bedazzled, beguiled, bewitched, bothered, bewildered. In short, he falls for Beth. He's never met her; but does that really matter? He has FALLEN IN LOVE WITH HER TYPED SOUL  ( swoon ye female hordes who spend your days writing and writing and writing and hoping some guy will LOVE YOUR TYPED SOUL! oh swoon! )

Adorkable Lincoln ( HAPPINESS IS JUST A THING CALLED LINCOLN) learns that beguiling Beth may actually return his affections; BUT, he can't let her know he knows ---lest she discover he has been email-spying on her for an age.

And now, for Shameless Quotage. Because, my lovely flock, if you are unmoved to buy this book after reading these amazing quotes well...well... you just don't belong to the Race of Joseph ( and if you don't know what race that is --- then you don't belong to the race either, right LM Montgomery?)



“The worst thing about the Internet, as far as Greg’s bosses were concerned was that it was now impossble to distinguise a roomful of people working diligently from a roomful of people taking the What Kind of Dog Am I? online personality quiz.”

“High school guys only appear hot to high school girls. It’s something to do  with the fluorescent lighting in the classrooms, I think. They’re actually really skinny and spotty , and they have giant feet.”

“The kind of coat a baby might need to go to the ballet. In Moscow. In 1918. To match her tiny pearls”

“October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins! O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!”

“Lincoln couldn’t explain, even to himself, why she mattered to him. She and Jennifer were both funny, both caring, both smart as whips. But Beth’s whip always caught him by the ankle. He felt like he could hear her talking when he read her mail, like he could see her even though he still didn’t know what she looked like. He felt like he could hear her laughing. He loved the way she put on kid gloves when Jennifer talked about her marriage and Mitch.  He loved the way she riffed on her siblings and her bosses and herself. He tried not to love that she could recite scenes from Ghostbusters, that she liked kung fu movies and could name all of the original X-Men---because those seemed like reasons a guy would fall for a girl in a Kevin Smith movie.”

“There’s something really romantic about that.  Every woman wants a man who’ll fall in love with her soul as well as her body.”

“Diet coke and rum is the most moronic drink of all time.  They should call it a Moron so that girls who order it would have to call themselves out at the bar.”

“Not Sears-model cute. More of an old-fashioned cute.”

“He stood for twenty minutes at the bedding aisle at Target, trying to choose a manly sheet set, then picked the ones with the violet pattern, because he liked violets and who else was ever going to see his sheets, anyway?”


More shameless love when Attached to Attachments returns on a blog near you

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I second and third and fourth (and so on) everything that you just said. This book is sheer, unadulterated happiness in book form and I love Every. Single. WORD.