make time for reading every week

This book was SO FUN to read! I had such a good time with it. His sense of humor is great here, and I love the way he weaves fantasy with real life. The story has good heart too. Read it!

Am reading a book of his short stories now, and they’re darker, a lot of ghost tales. I like that too but I enjoy him more when he’s being fun.

I have not been this scared by a book in twenty years. First night I laid in bed til two a.m. calculating the thickness of the glass slider separating me from the living dead, plotting my escape plan and trying to figure out the best hiding place, or whether it was a better idea to just take myself out before they got me. I wondered if I should jump with my kid off the highest bridge so they wouldn’t eat her. I mentally ran through various relatives and estimated their shooting ability, how likely they would be able to get a head shot on a gaggle of zombies, and oh yeah, wondering why they always travel in packs. Nobody’s ever explained that! Okay, I’m not crazy. I know the zombies are not coming for me. Well, not strictly speaking anyway. But he’s written an oral history based on his interviews with the “survivors,” their firsthand accounts of what happened during the Zombie War, the Great Plague. He covers the globe, because it was pandemic, from the refugees fleeing and spreading the disease, to the at-first slow and clueless but eventually chillingly efficient military response, and the political restructuring that followed the apocalypse to rebuild society. Imagine, former analysts and VPs having to now get retrained by former migrant farmhands and carpenters to do something useful because the human population had almost gone extinct and nobody knew how to build, repair or grow anything. Anyway, I guess it’s not hard to make the leap to any deadly global threat, and that’s probably what had me so riled about the damn zombies coming after us. Clearly, there’s only one thing to do if I’m ever gonna sleep again.

The Giant’s House: A Romance. Nothing romanticized about it. It’s a love story of sorts, an unconventional one, of two lonely misfits. A quiet, kind of heartbreaking story. She handles the characters in a very uncontrived, honest way; they ring true.

The Sister by Poppy Adams. I was enjoying it but my attention span is as bad as ever and once she launched into pages upon pages of moth research jargon, my brain walked out on it. It was overdue and I’d renewed it already so I just took it back. I never made it to all the secrets, damn it. Can’t somebody just give me the spoiler?

Thanks to Bookish for the recommendation. I have a book called Great Books for Girls, and this needs to be in it, obviously for the strong female heroine. Young, smart, resourceful and independent. And when she makes a sacrifice, it’s for the right reasons. In the Disney tales young girls are reared on, it seems they have to sacrifice part of themselves for the man, whereas Frankie sacrifices male approval to stay true to herself. My only regret is that my daughter isn’t old enough for it yet, but when she is, around age twelve or so, I’ll be really happy to give it to her. The only thing I would have changed is that I would have given the book a more admirable male character too. I don’t think a feminist novel and a strong male character are mutually exclusive.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (though my copy isn’t the 10th anniversary edition, but an old copy from the bookshop I volunteer at – I’ll check out the 10th anniversary one afterwards.) I’ll write more when I finish them but, they both are wonderful books about what make us human.

I’ve spent less time reading paper books lately. I read lots of pdfs etc , but it’s not as relaxing.

I’m scared of what my fees are for my overdue books. They’re going to punish me. Now that wouldn’t be a bad place to hang out, would it? We could all share stories about what book we were in for, and punishment would be to finish all the books we’d kept out late because we got excited and greedy and checked out too many at one time. The hardcore library criminals would be all book-nerdy, all well-read rebels not easily intimidated by the Librarian Authority Figure, one of whom is the warden of the place, by the way. Yeah, I could do some serious time there.

Christopher Moore is zany. Wacky. I don’t really know a better word right now, but he’s good for when you need a break from heavier stories. But I can’t read him too often because I tend to like my fiction a bit more serious, I guess, and by that I mean not all about the laughs. I’m not expressing what I mean very well. Here…reading books like this is kind of like being in a room with an extrovert who has had too much caffeine (coming from someone who’s not and doesn’t). No, I’m still not getting at what I mean. I guess I just like characters who feel real to me. And his stories are just too out there to feel real.

HOWEVER. I did like this story. Now, I was starting to feel just some annoyance at one point with it, because I wasn’t able to bond with the characters. (A horny, 19 year old vampire and his girlfriend, so y’know…) BUT. Then he introduced the character of Abby Normal, the little goth girl who becomes their “minion” and she humanized the story for me (not to mention made it even more fun). Her teenager diary entries about serving her “Dark Lord” and his mistress are as hilarious as . . . looking for the right simile . . . watching Young Frankenstein? Yeah, that funny. She needs her own book! She stole the story. It wouldn’t have been very good without her. The kid is precious.

I’m reading quite a few books at the moment, as I’m trying to teach myself various things, but this is the one I’m reading for pleasure – it’s a book I found in the second-hand bookshop I volunteer for, a collection of true stories from the “Nobel Prize-winning physicist, accomplished bongo-player and artist” Richard Feynman. I’m about halfway through it, and I like the stories a lot – the stories themselves aren’t that well-written or easy to read, but they’re good stories, and they do paint a great portrait of a fascinating and inspiring man. I especially loved the title story (you can read it here), of him and his first love Arlene. It made me choke up a little. After I finish this, I’ll have to seek out his first collection of stories, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! :)

Edit: Heh, from a Youtube comment I just saw: According to the book “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”, it is claimed that Feynman can beat 10 times with his right hand and 11 times with his left hand SIMULTANEOUSLY! And it is said that this is more difficult than quantum electrodynamics!