I’ve been on a bit of a reading binge recently. Can it have something to do with the gift of my Kindle, I wonder? Well, possibly, but I know it started before that.
Earlier in the year I picked out two mysteries from the shelves based on not much at all. Aunt Dimity’s Death was a lot of fun since I liked the main character a lot, and A Poisoned Season by Tasha Alexander introduced me to a new series as well, albeit in the middle (again). I bought the first one and read it second. Probably would have liked it better had I read them in the right order. And then I picked up another Aunt Dimity book just for good measure.
Then I read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, carrying on my Gaiman kick. Lovely writer. It was a dark book, but not without humour. I wish he wrote science fiction though. I get a bit fed up of magical stuff. I’d rather have a plausible in-this-world answer (says the card-carrying Catholic…). But what he writes lets him tell great stories beautifully, so it’s a small nit to pick. Very blokey. (oh wait, I remember him saying that he felt books have genders and that some of his are female and some are definitely male. I’m not going to check, but I’m betting that Neverwhere and American Gods are male in his mind.)
When I got my Kindle I immediately downloaded the third in the Tasha Alexander series and devoured that. That was mid-June.
Since then I have read World Without End by Ken Follet, which is a monstrous 1024 pages long and is the follow-up to Pillars of the Earth. Pillars is both a book and a board game and I love them both. To be honest, I think there were sections in World Without End where his editor had dozed off, but it kept me turning the pages, and I love the historical tidbits. I raced through that in a week or two.
Then I downloaded Stardust by Neil Gaiman and read that in about two days. Different from the film, and different from Neverwhere. I’m betting this is one of his female books, and I really enjoyed it. And in the context of a romantic adventure of course there should be magic…
Yesterday I went to the library and checked out A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle, which I had never read but which gets rave reveiews. I like kids’ books a lot and I never get out of the children’s basement in our library, so it works out fine. As it was, I really loved A Wrinkle In Time. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it. It takes science and the children seriously. Sci-fi for kids that doesn’t include any “fantasy” (No magic! No elves! Actual science!)? I would love it even if it wasn’t that well written, which it was. I found the character development a little light compared to some adult books, but that’s hardly a criticism, and not something I would have missed as a younger reader. And it’s not like the characters weren’t ones you could care about (I admit it, I teared up at one point). But there was action, action, action, and that’s what I was all about as a younger reader. I loved the 2-Dimensional world she threw in there, too.
(I’m still trying to remember the book I read as a kid that took place in three different time periods, and in each period a young girl living in this old house would see a ghost and there was a great twist at the end, and I thought maybe A Wrinkle In Time might be it, but it is SOO not that book.)
And that’s not counting the non-fiction I have on the go, like this and this.
Hmm.
The library has a summer reading program for adults as well as children. You’re supposed to read 15 books by the end of the summer. I was laughingly telling friends about this the other day and we all (moms and dads of young children) guffawed and wondered where we’d find the time.
Maybe this is why I feel like I need more sleep…