Books

I am going to start this out by making a bold and perhaps dangerous assumption. That anyone who reads this blog actually reads. Books you know, literature. And by literature I don’t necessarily mean the old classics like say Moby Dick. (This frankly is one of the worst books I have ever read. How in the hell could anyone take such a GOOD story and make such a lousy book out of it? I have been told that if you read it as it was written, one chapter a every week or two it is ok. I have my doubts.) I just mean real books, something that an author has spent some real time working on. (Thus eliminating many romance novels and series like The Executioner.) As an avid reader I expect you probably have a book or two sitting around your house that you can pick up at any time and read it and enjoy it. Over and over. In fact, it is often as good the second, third, or fifteenth, time as it was the first time. When I was in Junior high (that is Middle School for you young folks) and High School Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings filled that spot. (I’m almost ashamed to admit that it has been probably 15 years since I last read them) Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber took over for awhile later in High School and early in college. Now I don’t mean to say that these were all I was reading. I generally have three or four books going at any one time. And I don’t recall who said this first but I have always agreed with the statement that if a book isn’t good enough to read twice it probably isn’t worth reading once. (Samuel Clemons maybe????) (I can think of one real exception to that rule, Stephen Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever I read those when they were first published. I still have the hard back books sitting in my house. They were very good and I cannot bring myself to reread them. I would tell you why but I am getting far enough off topic as it is.)

This whole ramble came up because the day before yesterday I picked a book up from under my couch and began to read it; and stayed up until I had finished it again. What is this book? Wm. Mark Simmons’ One Foot in the Grave. A vampire novel with a bit of a twist. He has some sequels out to it that I haven’t read even though I keep telling myself I need to. I recommend it.

If you are curious as to what other books I am reading at the moment, I am still battering my way through God’s War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman (900 pages of small print), E.E. “Doc” Smith’s The Complete Skylark, (which deserves it’s own post for a variety of reasons), Laszlo Szabo’s Fencing and the Master, and I just finished Terry Prachett’s Small Gods.