Book 60: The Portable Dorothy Parker

Few books have much mileage on my bookshelf as the Portable Dorothy Parker. This has been my favorite book for years by my dead author. What continues to amaze me is how deep and amazing this little book is.

I wasn’t expecting to pick up the Portable Dorothy Parker but then I read my last book. I hated that one so much that I needed to have the perfect quotes to just slice apart the book and I went to my mentor. So if you read my last book blog, you would have seen a couple quotes pulled out of book reviews by Dorothy Parker. But reading the book reviews, made me want to pick up the whole book.

One of the fun things about rereading this book was seeing all the pages I had marked. Some pages are permanently dog-eared while others were dog-eared only temporarily. It’s amazing how in the past year or so, the poem ‘Post-Graduate’ has really hit home when I marked it I wasn’t never that broken hearted. I’m glad that’s in the page marked with a permanent dog-ear. I was surprised that my other two favorite poems (‘Indian Summer’ and ‘Philosophy’) wasn’t dog-eared but I could tell it was one of the pages that I did mark.

I’ve always thought that Dorothy Parker’s writing seems both timeless and set in time. I know that sounds like an oxymoron but it’s not. When it comes to the setting and descriptions of clothes, it marks it in the 1920s. But the way the streams of consciousness and how girls think about guys, that hasn’t changed. Sitting by a telephone and waiting for him to call, that hasn’t changed one iota. It’s why I keep going back to her.

I’m always amazed by how much I pick up every time I read the Portable Dorothy Parker. Some things like ‘Post-Graduate’, it was because I had my heart truly broken and I really learned at Sorrow’s knee that it’s all the self-same lore. Other things, I picked up more from getting more and more into history books. So my love of reading just feeds into the knowledge.

I knew this review would be glowing. But if I didn’t enjoy one of my favorite books, something is wrong with me. It was great reminder why I loved the book in the first place.