Male weepie

Or at least maudlin male sentimentality. It's especially bad in the preface or front matter in The Tender Bar, which actually has an official site. Later the book gets better and has some decent parts for reading aloud, particularly the segment about the bookstore in a forsaken part of Scottsdale, Arizona, and the kindness of giving away the books with the covers ripped off to be returned for credit as representing unsold books. I was also somewhat disaapointed that the bar parts of the book are more about his experiences as a young man, not a child. This book was on the new-books shelf at the Southeast Community library branch. I've been a grateful recipient of the somewhat shady giveaway of books with the covers ripped off. This happens when books are legitimately unsold, a reader starving for material, especially a kid, begs, and a kind-hearted person gives away coverless books intended to be destroyed. The book is truthful in its depiction of reading as a secret, unshared "vice" and how sometimes people learn, very much to their surprise, that someone thought to be known fairly well has a fondness for reading but, in accordance with a given social circle's customs, is slightly ashamed of it and doesn't deliberately reveal it or does so only when there's real intimacy. It sounds as though "his" bar had a bartender-controlled sound system, not a jukebox, also a disappointment here. I have a legitimate fondness, legimately come by, for jukeboxes. What a bonanza for a kid when a grown-up forks over five or six plays' worth of money (a whole quarter!).