Sunday, January 07, 2007

I'm a bookie

That is, I love to read. I love books.

And right now most of mine are scattered all over the den floor in heaps and piles. I'm rearranging stuff to fit in the aforementioned photo albums, and while I was at it, decided to alphabetize everything and separate fiction and nonfiction. It may take a while....

In another blog I read, someone mentioned keeping track of the books they've read over the course of the year, so I'm going to add that every time I finish one.

Now be warned if you're thinking you're going to get some high-class book list that will warrant careful and serious discussion of the deep thoughts contained therein. While not impossible, it's not likely.

I'm a fiction junkie. I love 'beach-reading' books. Trash books -- okay, a step up from Harlequin romances -- I just cannot stomach those, nor others of that ilk, although I've read a few bodice-rippers that were fun. And I'm a serial reader. When I find an author I enjoy, I often read everything I can find that s/he has written, and watch publisher lists for new ones. I like escape reading -- stuff I can read every night in bed and blot out all the monkey-mind thoughts whirling in my head.

Jodi Picoult is my current obsession, and I'm on book four of her 14, although not in date order. She writes about families and relationships, often with situations paralleling real stories, with a twist near the end. They're good, engrossing stories.

Nora Roberts
and her alter-ego JD Robb, are good storytellers too -- sometimes a little magic, sometimes a little fantasy, a little sex -- and very easy reads. Fun stuff.

Oh, there are so many others...Diane Mott Davidson and her caterer-heroine Goldie Baer Schultz; Barbara Delinsky; Anne Rivers Siddons whose book Fault Lines -- sappy though it may be -- hit me at a time in my life when I was deciding what to do about a life that no longer suited me. And I know I'm forgetting so many others.

I suppose those could be classified as 'romance' novels. Definitely chick-lit.

But I also like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, although not everything from either one. I don't want to see movies based on their books, though. That's someone else's interpretation, and a little too intense for me.

And I like Thomas Harris of the Hannibal Lecter entrees. The first one I read of his was Silence of the Lambs and I was hooked -- this before I had a clue that it was going to be a movie (which I've never watched in its entirety). Gripping storyteller, if fairly macabre.

Love mysteries. I've got the entire Nero Wolfe series on my shelf. Daddy was a die-hard fan too, and gave me his Rex Stout collection years ago. Oh, they're fairly old-fashioned -- no sex, for instance, and no detailed blood and gore, but hey -- they're about an obese, obsessive-compulsive, designer-beer drinking, orchid gardener who wears yellow pajamas and rarely leaves his house, and solves mysteries when he chooses to with the help of his go-fer (and narrator) Archie Goodwin.

Years ago I also read all the James Bond books: did you even know they were books before they were movies? Michael Crichton. Robin Cook. Robert Ludlum.

And then there are the treasures: John Updike, a prolific and versatile writer who I got to hear lecturein the '80s; Tom Wolfe, a journalist-turned-novelist whose richly descriptive Bonfire of the Vanities was simply ruined as a movie (and I got to hear him, too!). The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings series -- among the few I re-read.

It's always been my belief that you can't appreciate the truly wonderful writers until you've also read the bad and so-so ones. When I read truly wonderful books, I savor them and will go back to re-read passages just to enjoy the flow of the language. I speed-read most everything else.

We're not done with this topic. I'll never be done reading.

My current book is Picoult's Vanishing Acts.

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