Top ten signs you’re not going to graduate
10. On your paper “What I Plan To Do After Graduation,” your teacher wrote “Guess again”
9. Your final paper in Music class was entitled “Why Justin Bieber Is the New Mozart”
8. The last time you picked up a book, it took you the better part of the afternoon to find all the Waldos
7. It’s bad enough you had an affair with a teacher, but the shop teacher?!
6. In Geography class, you identified the Ivory Coast as “two brands of soap”
5. In your high school yearbook, you were voted ‘Most Likely to Be Unable to Tell His Ass from a Hole in the Ground’
4. You were caught out on the football field, sticking a suppository into a hole in the ground
3. In Chemistry, the only elements you could name from the periodic table were Neon, Freon, Dione, and Leon
2. After years of instruction, you still talk into the wrong end of the telephone
1. The only history you learned all year long, you learned from Glenn Beck’s Classroom of the Air
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
by Melissa Marr, thinking I would read the first chapter while they finished boarding and got through the announcements. I planned to sleep the rest of the way home…187 pages later, we landed in Cleveland. I hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. Instead, I was utterly absorbed in the book, wishing I had just another hour in the air so I could finish it. 
describes itself as “a novel in stories.” To some extent, I think that’s true of all novels, but it is very pronounced in The Civilized World. Each chapter is a distinct story, although the stories overlap in a way that gives a much broader picture. Like real life, you don’t know every detail of every story, which sometimes leaves you wondering about how things happened. The stories draw you in — they are interesting on their own, and they leave you wondering how and when they will tie in with the first storyline.
