Featured at the bookstore this week is "Aruba," the new offering from famous disappear-er Natalee Holloway's father.
Something is very wrong with this title. Not right! Quite wrong! Maybe it's the lingering dissonance between the shiny, happy, sun-swept, coconutty-smelling images that the word "Aruba" continues to bring to mind and Dave Holloway's fervent efforts to depict the place as a floating crack hovel of corruption. (As opposed to, you know, all the scrupulously ethical floating crack hovels.) Maybe it's my underlying distaste for the "blame the place" mentality. Maybe it just seems too much like a tabloid header, and my subconscious intellectual elitist rebels at the desecration of precious feature space that could be utilized in alerting the general public to the 100th anniversary of Samuel Beckett's birth.
Regardless, if "Aruba" is a whomping success, publishers should certainly consider a series of like titles:
"Dakota" by Yoko Ono
"The Wall Outside the Washington Hilton" by Nancy Reagan
"Dallas" by Jackie Kennedy*
"Memphis Motel" by Coretta Scott King**
"Balcony at Ford's Theatre" by Mary Todd Lincoln***
*My perceptive and intrepid factcheckers inform me that dear Jackie O. is no longer with us. However, such a trifling detail will surely serve as no major impediment to the ghostwriters.
**Ditto.
***Ditto. Obviously. Please don't take my History degree away. I....need? It?
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