Books - Books - Books

With the combination of my Kindle app and audio books, I've been reading much more this year than I have in previous years. I just finished reading Susan Boyle's autobiography, which was an excellent book, for anybody who has followed her career. With all the stuff that gets reported in the media, it was nice to hear her own version of her life. I'm sure she had lots of writing and editorial assistance, but what comes across is the story of how this woman got to be the dowdy 40-something woman who blew everyone away on "Britain's Got Talent" a couple of years ago. Not quite the rank amateur that she was presented as, but totally unprepared for going from a once-bullied, quiet, private woman from a small town in Scotland to overnight being an international sensation, thanks to YouTube, something she'd never heard of before.

Absolutely fascinating.

I'm also listening to Lee Childs' "Die Trying," which is the second of his Jack Reacher books. The problem with this audiobook is that it is read by Dick Hill, who also reads Michael Connelly's books. Now you have to know that Connelly's hero, Harry Bosch, was, before the book series begins, a "tunnel rat" in Vietnam, one of the guys who investigated the many tunnels throughout the country during the war years. So the other day I'm listening to Dick Hill read about Jack Reacher being trapped in this tiny, narrowing tunnel and I'm thinking "well, that should be right up his alley because of his experience with tunnels in Vietnam." Oops. Got my authors confused because of the same voice telling the story!

I have several other books on my Kindle app just waiting to be read -- Jon Katz' latest, "Rose in a Storm," Nora Ephron's "I Remember Nothing," Armistead Maupin's latest in his "Tales of the City" series, "Mary Ann in Autumn," the autobiography of Mark Twain, "Oogy: the Dog only a Family Could Love," a new Bill Bryson called "At Home," "A Funny Thing Happened" by Michael J. Fox and a few that I picked up because they sounded interesting at the time. My Kindle is starting to look like my bookshelves, heavy with books I want to read and hope to someday get around to!

With books on my mind, I dusted off this short meme that I picked up a couple of years ago from a blog that seems to no longer exist:

Hardcover or paperback, and why?
These days it's kindle and audio, but if I'm going to actually hold a real book in my hands, I'd prefer a hard cover simply because the print size is generally larger. It's such a strain on my eyes to read a paperback, as a general rule, that I lose interest long before the book ends.

My favorite quote from a book is...
I don't know that I have a favorite, but here is one from one of my favorite books: "A man without words is a man without thought." -- John Steinbeck from "East of Eden."

The author (alive or dead) I would love to have lunch with would be
I have known some authors and they aren't necessarily the most enjoyable people to be around, but I think that I would like to spend some time with Nora Ephron, who seems very funny and has a lot of the same kinds of irrational fears about aging that I have. I suspect we would laugh a lot.

The smell of an old book reminds me of...
...wonderful old book stores, with neat nooks and crannies that are hiding little gems that were once loved by someone else who read them. Old pages slowly disintegrating, mixed with some rat droppings and cobwebs and maybe the smell of the pipe of the guy who owns the bookstore.

If I could be the lead character in a book, it would be
Hmmm...if I were younger and in better shape, I'd like to be Claire Randall in Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series...such great adventures, and wonderful relationships. But such a lot of work! It would also be fun to be Mma Ramotswe in Alexander McCall's "Ladies #1 Detective Agency" books.

The most overestimated book of all time is
I'm not sure "overestimated" is the right word, and "of all time" certainly seems a bit broad in its scope! I suspect the word would be "overrated," and it's such a subjective decision! In recent books, I felt the "Twilight" series was quite overrated. "The Lovely Bones" was raved about and I didn't like it much at all. And sorry, Jane Austen fans, but she does nothing for me.

I hate it when a book...
...engages in purple prose (there was a book called "The White Rose" [I can't find it on Amazon now] which everybody in my office was raving about but which I felt was just awful, awful, awful. I also hate it when a story masquerades as a proselitizing message (as the "Left Behind" series does--it made me so angry I threw the Book 1 across the room! I never finished it). And I'm not really all that happy about gratuitous cussing for shock value.