Friday, August 1, 2008

Alice Feiring book review, or my book-based bitchfest...

So on a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, while wandering in their pathetically tiny wine section, I saw a book, "The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved The World from Parkerization" and I bought it. With a title as arrogant as that, it was hard to resist! Here's a book about someone who's going to save us all! How can you not buy a book like that?!? I mean, there it is, salvation, supposedly without all the confession and need to say "Hail Mary" a billion times. I might even get away without a time out OR a spanking!!

I shoulda known it wasn't going to be that easy. If you were thinking about buying the book, don't! Seriously! It's 258 pages full of Alice's own mental masturbation! She spends about thirty pages actually giving information about wines, and the rest is just her whining. It's worse than reading Dostoevsky!!

The book is all about our "heroine's" *snort* journey through the sometimes convoluted world of wine, and her (mis)adventures along the way. It's a fucking joke, I don't care about her first wine love and the scandal that she's never been able to clear up surrounding the winemaker. I also don't care about her stupid ass (lack of) love affairs, her friends and roommates, her dance therapy shit, her travels, her amazing super tasting skills, or her allergies and aches and pains.

What I care about are her views of wine and the wine world, her insights, and her purported saving of the world. And so far, I haven't gotten much. All I've gotten is that she doesn't like Robert Parker, which I happen to agree with her on. I also agree that the reason he rates so many in-your-face fruit bombs so high is because he is, as she calls it, "quantifying" as opposed to the rest of us, who "qualify". I also happen to enjoy wines grown with sustainable practices, and am a big fan of artisan wines.

I missed the part in the book where she saved the world. Did they leave that chapter out? I know I'm being petty and trivial, but if she says she saved the world, I'd like to see some evidence of it. Why do I still see Robert Parker scores on everything? Is she not realizing that by saying shit like that, and writing a book that goes nowhere, she's becoming exactly like the man she loves to bitch about?


Maybe I need that spanking after all....

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