Sweep Of The Second Hand

I just finished reading a very funny book "The Sweep Of The Second Hand" by Dean Monti. I have been looking for it to read for a long time and stumbled across it at the Woodridge Library. I can remember first reading about it in the local paper a couple of years ago. I hope he writes another one. It was one of those books that make you laugh out loud while you're reading it. He was compared to Nick Hornby on the cover and I can see why. There's not enough good funny books out there. Dean was a classmate of mine in high school. We took a creative writing course taught my Mr. Butz that culminated in the publishing of "Parallax" a school annual of creative writing. It was a great experience and produced a published author - Dean Monti. Excellent book Dean.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this comic debut, Malcolm Cicchio loses one minute of sleep with each passing night; at that rate, he figures that his heart will explode in 16 months. The manager of a failing art film theater, he has recently split up with Lena, his girlfriend of seven years, who is set to marry a successful cardiologist. He feels that he might as well have loser tattooed on his forehead. And then the babes seemingly start falling from the sky. First he meets Anne, who answers the phone at an emergency switchboard and admits that her favorite movie is Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. This is reason enough to schedule a two-day film festival, to which he invites Soren Sonderby, a Swedish actor who claims to have had the limp-on part of a leper in Bergman's Seventh Seal. Then there's Darlene, the singer with the Circadian Rhythm Section, who wrangles an invitation to play Lena's wedding the same weekend as the film festival with Malcolm in tow. That string of days serves as the book's culmination when everything may or may not come together for Malcolm in the middle.