Literacy

Screw it, y'all.

Each time I write an entry about books, I always promise that it's the last one. I'm no longer promising that, 1) because I'm about to do a new one, and 2) I just finally got around to getting my Dallas library card, so now my house is flooded with books.

I forgot how much fun random reading can be. Usually, whenever I get a new book, I have to be very into either the story or the author, since I'm actually buying it. A book is like a long-term investment to me. This could be sort of mitigated by going to Half Price Books, since the investment was remarkably smaller, but there was still always the thought "do you really need this book for the rest of your life?" And thus, my book collection was severely limited.

With my library card, there's no risk (everything is free) and the selection is much cleaner than the Half Price Books, which always give off the vibe that they're carrying some sort of book-transmitting plague-like disease. Throw in the fact that my new couches are absolutely perfect for curling up and reading on, and I'm right back in old bookworm mode.

Just to give a quick taste of the flavor of my life now - I've had the card since Saturday. Number of books read since then: Four. Doing the complicated math, that's basically a book a day, if you count Saturday as a full day. Madness.

Anyways, I get to blather on about them because it is my birthright:

Bag of Bones, Stephen King - This one sort of doesn't count, because I was already half way through it when the counting started, and already owned it. I've actually read it a couple of times (read: 4) because it's a very satisfying and weird read. It's nice and pretty creepy in the right places. I always enjoy me some Stephen King and this is my favorite one to pick up if I need to pass some time with an inconsequential book. It's not too scary (like, say It, which continues to haunt me) and it moves pretty fast for an 8 billion page book. Plus the ending is pretty harsh and still sort of moving on repeated readings.

Brimstone, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child - The ultimate example of popular thriller popcorn books, these two guys have written something like 8 different books in this series about an unstoppable FBI agent and his various plucky sidekicks. The first one, Relic, was actually really well done and pretty unique. Over the series they sort of wandered out into complete randomness and varying degrees of badness. But I've still stuck with them because overall they're just great, gory, pulp books. Which, y'know, I dig.

They finally hit a nice high point again with Cabinet of Curiosities, a book that actually disturbed me greatly (but in a good way). In hindsight I probably should not have read it while out working in a summer camp with limited amounts of electricity and long walks in darkened woods. In true form, though, they followed it up with my least favorite book in the series, Still Life With Crows, which was concentrated suck and completely put me off the whole set, enough so that I didn't even pick up Brimstone when it came out.

But now that I've got this no risk library card, I grabbed it off the shelf figuring that there wasn't any harm in it. And it turned out to be pretty good, at least much better than I expected, if a little off-the-wall. It advanced the overall plot pretty well too (there is a sort of long term story arch about the FBI agent's family that hides in the background) and has piqued my interest enough to go ahead and get the latest one that came out back in June.

Geography Club & The Order of the Poison Oak, Brent Hartinger - As I've stated previously, I am a sucker for cheesy gay lit. All of it, I devour it whole. It speaks to a place not-so-deep inside me, that is still a dorky gay high school boy. These two books are actually a step or two above cheesy, so of course I am all about these books. They're written in the traditional YA Fiction style, set in a sophomore year of high school, and they just make me smile. RoommateFrank makes fun of me, because I really dig the style of the author - very directly conversational, narrating jokes and talking to the reader, even if sometimes it comes off as trying a little too hard.

It sounds ridiculously conceited, but the writing reminds me a lot of something I would write (if infinitely better), especially the pacing on the jokes and the in-text digressions about metaphors and what have you. Sometimes the obvious themes are a little heavy-handed (burn victims are just like victims of homophobia, y'all) but on the whole, they're just great quick reads that make me generally happy. Also, they made me laugh out loud several times, which RoommateFrank will not abide and he now mocks me incessantly. Whatever, I respond to books, especially good ones. If I didn't think it would scare off every reader I ever had, I would go into a lengthy examination of these books, because I'm a dork like that, but I'll just stop and say: very good.

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Now I still have a Chuck Palahnuik to get through (God, so creepy, but so good) and the new (okay, 7 month old) Chris Rice gay-thriller-written-in-the-style-of-the-old-south novel, something I always hold near and dear to my heart, because come on, talk about hitting a target demographic.