Stuff I've Been Reading, Part 2

It always bothers me when I don't have something to read. It makes me feel a bit aimless. Even if I don't have time to read at the moment, I like to know that there is something waiting for me when I do have the time. So, if I find that I have finished a book and don't have another one ready, there are a couple things I can do.

The first is just to re-read something I like. This explains why I have read "Pride and Prejudice" a dozen times or why I spent this past summer re-reading the "Harry Potter" series. There is something very appealing about being able to pick up a book and know that I will enjoy it -- not having to worry whether it is complete waste of time. (Maybe other people don't worry about this, but I do. I consider my reading time very precious and get annoyed when I find I have wasted it on something like "The Shipping News".)

But there are, of course times when I feel I have re-read all my old favorites too recently to want to pick them up at the moment. Or maybe I just want something new. In these situations my strategy is to flail wildly around a library or bookstore or, more recently, the internet until I find something that looks good. (Best website for inexpensive books: half.com. It's like going to a used bookstore without having to actually GO to used bookstores, which tend to smell funny and attract very strange people.)

This tactic has produced some mixed results. I just finished "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" by Mark Haddon which has to be one of the weirder books I have ever read. It is written from the point of view of an autistic fifteen year-old boy and is like nothing I've ever read before. There were a lot of times I wasn't sure whether something in the book was meant to be funny or sad. Probably both, which was what made it so compelling. I read Haddon's "A Spot of Bother" a few years ago. It is also weird and funny and sad.

I just started "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold, which is also a very unusual book in that it is written from the point of view of a dead teenage girl. I will warn you that, very early on, she gives a rather graphic description of her rape and murder, so you should probably avoid the book if you would rather not subject yourself to that.

On the less positive side, I tried to read "The Bourne Identity," which someone had recomended to me. Plotwise, it was okay and there are some very suspenseful passages, but I just couldn't get over the rather contrived and wooden diologue. I ended up giving up on it halfway through, which is something I rarely ever do. I can actually only remember two other books that I found myself literally unable to get through. (That is, books that I chose to read and couldn't get through. I am excluding books that I was assigned to read in school, which I was rarely EVER able to get through.)

One was "Tom Jones", which my sister gave me one year for Christmas and which I fully expected to like, but there was just too little going on in it. When I came to an entire chapter that did nothing but explain what was going to happen in the next chapter, I decided I just couldn't go on.

The second one was "The Plot Against America" (also a gift, this time from my dad) which I tried to get through TWICE, but with no success. Philip Roth seems to have the uncanny knack of taking a unique and potentially interesting plot and making it dull and pompous. If you want to read a book with a World War II alternate history, a much better choice is Len Deighton's "SS GB," which imagines a successful Nazi invasion of England.

By the way, I am completely aware that book titles should not be put in quotation marks, but I have not yet figured out how to underline things on this blogging site. If you know how, please feel free to pass that information along.