At the end of last week, I finished reading this fun book written by Boyd Morrison.  Was it a good book?  Heck yeah!  It was as good and fun and entertaining a read as any I’ve read before.  The dialogue was great and it really felt like you were there with a few old friends recounting exploits of days gone by.  It reminded me of the feel of the Dean Koontz “Odd Thomas” books, the ones where you feel right at home and enjoy every minute of the reading.

It offers compelling characters who feel real and you really want to be on their side.  The enemies were as real as the heroes and you felt their pain when they were defeated, in this case, multiple times!

The story was entertaining, and I think that’s the best thing to say about anything you read. I have to admit to having difficulty putting this one down, I wanted to know what was happening to my friends, and where they were going.  I needed to know what was going to happen on the next page, and kept reading even after I promised myself, “only one more chapter.”  Good books do that to you, they keep you reading until 2am, or 3am, or later, as the case may be.

But The Roswell Conspiracy was a freebie, and it’s easy to get excited by a free book, you say.  The challenge with those freebies is to get you to go out and buy the others in the series, or other books by the same author, which I will, Boyd Morrison is now definitely on my “must read” list.  I will be spending my hard earned cash on Tyler Locke 1 & 2 in a very short time.

But first, I have to finish the next book I started reading, which is Seven Days From Sunday (An MP-5 CIA Thriller, Book 1).  This book, written by M.H. Sargent, is a classic spy, good guy vs bad guy thriller, with lots of grey areas in between.  It’s this book that kept me up until 3:30am this morning, even though I had to get up at 8 to help me get my children off to school.  Fortunately for me, my children are fairly independant, and they managed to get off to school without hardly disturbing me.  I know, I’m spoiled!

MP-5 is a clandestine group within the CIA and in this book they investigate terrorists operating out of Iraq in the current day.  The book feels like it could be something happening right now, with folks on the opposite side of the world, with events that seem as probably as any of a multitude of things that pop up on CNN.  It’s one of those books that draws you in slowly, carefully, until you’re ensnared and keep reading to find out if the world is going to end or not within those 200-300 pages!  But I’m not finished it yet, maybe the world does end, but maybe not.  (ok, probably not, it is Book 1 after all!)

Next on my hit list are actual paper books, yes, Amazon just delivered my Odd Thomas fix today! (remember, I spoke of him earlier, before the doorbell rang with his delivery!)

Odd Thomas is one of my favorite all time Characters, and I’ve learned to love all the books that Dean Koontz writes, from the first of his I read “Tick Tock” to this most recent Odd adventure, “Odd Apocalypse.”  Odd is one of those lovable fellows who also seems to rescue the world from certain doom on an almost daily basis, but he does it without Surface to Air Missiles, AK-47 and snub nosed revolvers.  Only on occasion does he find himself armed with anything more than his quick wit and charm.  So I’m really eager to start Odd Apocalypse, just as soon as I finish Seven Days From Sunday, and with the hours reading it at night, it may be done before the night is over.

You read it right, reading is an addiction, once you start, you can’t stop.  You crave the written word, and for the longest time, it meant getting out of the house and running down to the corner store at the least, to get the latest piece of fiction added to the wire rack, sandwiched somewhere between the candies and the magazines.  If there wasn’t a new book that piqued your interest, then there was always that amazing stand of magazines, and of course the daily paper.

But now you don’t even have to get out of bed!  You can turn over and grab your multi-function device and download something to read, or even just start surfing the net for the latest articles that suited you.  Amazon came out with their Kindle reader, Apple has it’s ipad, and others have followed in their footsteps to create a market where you can buy any book, magazine or newspaper you want to read at the touch of your fingers.  And sometimes it’s even cheaper than it was at the corner store!

I’ve had my Kindle now for just over a year, and I’ve read the heck out of it, it’s got dings and scratches from being with me just about everywhere.  And if my Kindle wasn’t handy, I had the Kindle App on my smartphone to fill in the gaps.  It’s only a true junkie that realizes that this is still not enough, it’s not just Amazon that offers books online, Kobo does too, so does Google and a plethora of others.  Many books are public domain and available online to download to your favorite e-reader, or to read on your laptop/desktop or tablet!

Kindle has their reader app, Kobo does too, so does Nook Google and just about everyone else.  And to help the reader junkie, there are websites that enable your mad passion for reading.  These websites get you great offers on e-books for almost any platform, and even offer you freebies!  My two current enablers are pixelofink.com and bookbub.com.

Pixel of Ink(www.pixelofink.com) offers you at least 2 free ebooks per day, as well as great deals and outstanding offers on current ebooks available from Amazon.com.  If you have a kindle registered to a different location, it suffices to search for the title of interest you want at your local amazon (amazon.ca for me) and 9 out of 10 times it is also available for free for you too!

BookBub(www.bookbub.com) places you on a mailing list, where you can customize the types of books you like to read, and they will send you the latest best offers and free books that suit your tastes.  Bookbub, however, doesn’t just stick with great offers and freebies from Amazon, they also include the same from Kobo, Google, Nook, and others as well.  You select the retailers and categories in your profile.

I’ve managed to fill up my kindle and have gone a good distance filling up my kobo app as well.  Being a voracious reader, and open to just about any type of material, I’ve got more books now than I could ever read, and I’m still getting more!

I can’t stop reading, and I’ll clue you in on some of the great freebies I’ve gotten over the next few weeks, as I pore through them all.  The only downside to these free books, is they may get you hooked on an author you didn’t know about, and that’s when you start buying the rest of his library.  But books are worth every cent, are they not?

Yes, we all have done it at some time, read well past our bedtimes, and then felt sorry for it the next morning, waking with crud encrusted eyes, sore necks and a pain in our backs, trying hard to focus our eyes further than the 18 inches we held the book away from our faces the night before.  And yet when anyone asks, we say something silly like, “I just didn’t sleep well” but we all know that’s not the truth, we’re addicted to reading, and can’t put the book(s) down for our own health.

And yet folks still tell me that books are not a drug, not a controlled substance, and we cannot possibly be addicted to something that is good for us.  Still, I read until about 4 in the morning, knowing full well that I had to get up at 7 to get ready for the day.  I *knew* I was going to suffer for the reading I did the night before, and still I couldn’t help myself.

So I did a little more reading this morning, some of the heavier sort, to see if I could understand addiction a little bit more.  I found out a bit about alcoholism, which can become addictive, and yet there appears to be only slight withdrawal symptoms, and those less than the withdrawal symptoms from caffeine addiction. I also found out that there appears to be no withdrawal symptoms when it came to reading, nor video game addiction, but both can be quite damaging while engaged in them.  According to most definitions, withdrawal symptoms are an important part of defining an addiction.

But there in the Journal of Medicine I was reading this morning I came across this:

Habitual psychological and physiological dependence on a substance or practice beyond one’s voluntary control.

Which, I think, defines the addicted reader perfectly.  It’s impossible for an addicted reader not to read, and he will read cereal boxes if he has to in order to get that reading fix.

That being said, I’ve not written for 2 weeks because I’ve been horribly addicted to “A Song of Ice and Fire” series by George R. R. Martin.  I read through “A Game of Thrones” after having been loaned it from a good friend of mine (Cameron, you know who you are!) and then decided that I needed to own this series, and purchased the 4 book box set.

Side note about this particular boxed set, or the one I purchased at least, they were not in order..    What does it mean when you purchase a box set and they are not in order, you may make the mistake of starting to read the last one instead of the second.  Made for a confusing few chapters, to say the least.

But back to where I was going, the books are fantastically enthralling, and pull you deep into the world of the 7 Kingdoms and the war among Kings.  They’re not small books by any stretch, about 1000 pages each, and they are quite difficult to put down, as I’ve found to my dismay, at 4am.

I am a stickler, I’ve started purchasing these books in paperback, and will continue the series in paperback, even knowing that the 5th book is out now in Hardcover, and I’m nearly done the box set already.  I will wait, as I’m waiting for the 3rd book from Stieg Larsson, and The Girl who kicked a hornets nest.

In the meanwhile, I’ll have to satisfy my addiction with something else, or, perhaps, read a bit slower.

Yes, I read the news, and it’s great to see that there still exists in Montreal a quality english language daily.  The Montreal Star folded some years ago, and the Daily News was pushed aside, but at least the Montreal Gazette still manages to do some quality reporting, which some had probably feared would decline over time.  The past few months have seen the Gazette, and the french La Presse come out with some very informative pieces on our recently crumbling infrastructure, things just seem to be falling down around us, literally in some cases.

I honestly don’t believe government would be taking the actions they are now, if it weren’t for these two papers and the pressure they’ve been helping us apply.  True, television has got some of it, but it’s more flash than substance in many cases.  The Gazette also entertains though, I do enjoy my weekend funnies, even if they’ve moved them around a bit this last weekend.  But it’s still the front section that get’s turned page by page, and read most thoroughly.

I have to admit though, I do get a lot of news information online, heck, as an internet junkie, it wouldn’t be honest to say I didn’t.  Google news feeds through igoogle let’s me customize what I want to read, and what info I’m most interested in.

But for entertainment, I read books, and not just books, the occasional magazine, and I’m a regular subscriber to Readers Digest, and have enjoyed the articles, and the occasional funny from those folks as well.

As you may remember I also mentioned e-reading.  Now I don’t own a Kindle yet, and recent reports are leading me to believe that the wait for a Kindle Tablet may not be such a good idea, but I do have a kindle app on my smartphone, and I do read a good number of e-books, mostly free, but I did recently purchase a novel from Stephen King, “UR.”

Now why did I go and purchase an e-book without having a dedicated e-reader?  Well, to tell the truth, I’m a big Stephen King fan, and this book was an e-reader special, written specially for the Kindle, about a Kindle.  I’m relatively convinced it would have been better, and eerier, had I read it on an actual Kindle, but it was still a very good read, standard King fare, and definitely enjoyable.  Before the “low people” made their appearance, it became pretty obvious during the book they and their “living” vehicles would arrive soon enough.  I was glad to hear from them, and think King would do well writting a few more books about the different levels of that lovely Dark Tower.

I also finished reading The Invisible Man this week, and it ended pretty much as I had thought it would, but I couldn’t stop comparing it to the movie I watched a few years ago with Chevy Chase called “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” both invisibles are chased by the police, but the endings are quite different, with Chevy Chase’s movie ending with a happy marriage and children, and HG Wells Character not fairing nearly as well.

While doing some research, I stumbled on a novel with the same name as the Chevy Chase movie, as I understand they are not the same stories, I’m sorely tempted to find my way into reading that one.  If only there was a kindle version I could get, alas, I’m out of luck.

I just thought of something funny while typing that subject, I could have put “The Invisible Post” and added a whole lot of whitespace, but something tells me not many would have understood, nor appreciated my keen sense of humour…  (yeah, with a u, I’m canadian, so sue me! )

Now I’ve begun reading The Invisible Man, mostly based on the fact that I could read it for free with my kindle app, but also because I’ve always been curious of the origin of the story after having seen one or two movies on the subject.  And you’ve got to admit, Harry Potter has added a bit of lore the the idea of invisibility lately as well.

The movies invariable start with the making of the invisible man, that is, it starts with a visible man, with house home and family, then goes through becoming invisible, and either ending up with a newly visible man, or happy man in his invisibility.  The book starts with the invisible man, trying to pass himself off as any other man trudging along his daily life, only he’s trying to get his life back, without having to reveal his “transparent” secret.

Which makes things interesting, folks start to assume that the dark shrouded figure must have experience some horrible accident, which of course he has, and people start by feeling sad and sorry for what they assume is a horribly disfigured man underneath the bandages hiding his invisibility.

Somehow, I thing starting the movies off on the same foot would have made for a more enjoyable flick, but that’s just me.  The book is extremely well written, but then again I may be biased as I’m having such fun reading it.  Also, H.G. Wells is no schlep when it comes to literary works.

I have to admit, I”m only 1/2 way through the book,but so far, I’m thoroughly enjoying the reading of it.

Other things to read, the newspaper, been spending a good deal of time, all summer in fact, trying to find out about the state of our roads, and the intrepid reporters of The Montreal Gazette and La Presse have done a good job keeping their readers informed of the things the government hasn’t exactly been keeping us informed of…  I have not but praise for both papers, whose persistence has allowed us all to know a little bit more than we may have wanted to know, but at the same time, we have a better feel,and can apply more pressure, about our roads and city infrastructure.  Reading is good, and we can take pleasure in informative news articles as well as popular fiction.

Kindle is apparently coming out with a tablet, something that will be able to challange, some say with success, the Apple iPad.  I’m not so sure, but I do know that the Kindle is the one to beat when it comes to e-readers, nothing else is quite as good or anywhere near as dominant in the field.

But I’ve been considering getting a kindle since last November, since I saw the nice one my brother in law has at Thanksgiving.  And the pages looked like pages.  It made it really easy for me to start my journey towards electronic reading.  And it was that, as well as the Kindle app on my phone that really got me interested in e-books in the first place.  To be anywhere in the world, and have a library of books to choose from.  With a Kindle 3G, I would have my very own bookstore in my hands, anywhere I roam, without having to pay roaming charges, or any charges for the 3G download service!  This is very convincing.  I am very convinced.  I will get a Kindle, but will it be an e-reader, or will it be a Kindle Tablet?  This, I’m not so sure about.

Reading on my cell phone does depend on the environment, too bright, and, like the iPad, it’s impossible to see the text, without a shroud covering you and your electronic device.  The Kindle dedicated e-reader, however, works just fine.  Point one for the Kindle e-reader.  Now, the new Kindle Tablet, will it have the same sort of visibility problems as the iPad?  Frankly we just don’t know.  For now, I can say that reading Kindle books on my phone is easier than reading Kobo books on my phone, as the kindle app has a nicer looking color palette, black on beige, kinda like a real book; kobo is black on white, and can be tiresome on the eyes.

So I read on my kindle app, more often than I would have first thought.  This past week I finished “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I must say it was a compelling book, although in some sections, the language was a bit stilted, but that’s only because of the “growth” of the english language since it was written.  I enjoyed it, but again, was not surprised by the ending.  More and more, it becomes harder and harder for me to find any peice of litereature, or common trash novels, where the ending isn’t predictable.  Maybe it’s the large number of books I’ve already read, I don’t know.  I know they made a movie recently based on the book, and even though I never saw the movie, I could vividly picture all the characters, almost to their minutest details.  It was a good book, and one I encourage folks to go out and read, even if they get it for free like I did.

This week, I’ll be reading “The Invisible Man” from which numerous movies have been spawned, and sequels to these movies even.  I’m hoping I enjoy it as much as the other free reads I’ve downloaded, but we’ll see.  I’ll also be buying my first e-book, “UR” from Stephen King.

You may all know that I’m a rather large fan of Mr. King, currently have approx 90-95% of his books in Hardcover in my library, including a few select first run editions.  Although I cannot afford some of the more impressive editions that he has come out with in recent years, I’d love to get my hands on them.  One day, when my ship comes in.

I decided to purchase “UR” after actually finding a steal on Amazon for his next book coming out in November, “11/22/63.”  Most older folks will recognize the date that JKF was assassinated, while thost younger ones will have to look it up for themselves.  I’ve not even read the synopsis, cause I want to read it straight through.  I have tried hard not to read synopses of books when the author is someone I know and love.  That’s for “fishing” expeditions when I can’t find anything by an author I like, or I happen by the discount book table.  I bought (or pre-bought) “11/22/63″ when I noticed that the pre-order price was 20$ less than the release price.

Where have I been all these years!  Had I known about these pre-order prices in the past, I’d have saved myself a small fortune!  Methinks I need to keep my eye on Amazon much more often.

Until next week, read on your easy chair, read on your boat, read anywhere, but just go! Read!

I love to read, and even when I’m reading, I tend to find something else I want to read, which can put one in a bit of a backlog.  This past week I was away on vacation, whether or not it was a deserved vacation is a completely different story.  But while away, I had a lot of time to read a book or 3.

Last time I spoke to you all, I was talking about my Kobo and Kindle applications and the books I was supposed to be reading on them.  Currently loaded on the Kindle is “The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and just finised on the Kobo is “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley.  Two very fine books

As I just finished “Brave New World,” I must say it’s a pretty interesting view of the future, and a friend of mine said he found it to be more realistic a depiction than George Orwell’s “1984.”  I disagree.  I find both to have certain merits, and moreso based on the times they were written in, but both tend to look at the world from a very region-centric perspective.  Both are British novels, they both refer to the UK as the world power.  There was a time when this was true, but at the moment, it’s not quite so, and even those Americans who claim that theirs is the “true world power” may be deluding themselves.  Right at present the only truly powerful world power is China, no matter how much you may dislike this, it’s true.  Of course there’s a lot we don’t know about China, so we tend to be seeing only what they want us to see.  But that is probably why I feel Orwell’s 1984 is more realistic.  If China continues on it’s path, it may well become the global influencer, and as it’s got a whole lot of control over it’s populace, it may be considered Orwellian.  Be that as it may, the UK still persists in it’s CCTV’s to keep an eye on everything, but tends to miss out on some things as well.

What I do like about “Brave New World” is it’s focus on what people want, and in that respect, it’s pretty darn accurate, we all want to be happy, and breeding a world of happy people could very well be possible, although we’d never understand what we’ve done until it was too late, and then we’d find ourselves amazed at what an individual could do, were he pushed hard enough.  The ‘Savage’ is who we are, even though we don’t always act on our desires, they’re what truly motivates us, and it’s society that is slowly trying to influence us to accept what they deem best for us, for us to conform.  Which isn’t always good. 

During my vacation, I also picked up a couple of paperbacks too.  I finished both “Spider Bones” by Kathy Reichs and “Templar Salvation” by Richard Khoury.  I enjoyed both, but not necessarily equally.

For those who know Kathy Reichs, she’s a Forensic Anthropologist who works for the crime labs in Montreal, Québec and Charlotte, North Dakota.  She written novels based on her knowledge, and experiences.  The first novel was “Deja Dead” and was based in Montreal.  I was immediately intrigued as I knew most of the locations mentioned in the book, and haven’t stopped them since that first one.  Now “Spider Bones” is the 13th novel, and I’m believing that 13 wasn’t her lucky number.  It’s the shortest book of the lot, and seems to be a bit less “filling” than the rest.  It may be that her time is more taken up by the television series based on a younger Temperance Brennan (“Bones” on Fox,) but this book was the least enjoyable of her collection.  And yes, I do have them all.  The characters of the book are known to her readers, but they seemed somewhat lifeless for the most part and kinda left me flat.  I hate to say anything bad about any book, because of my addiction to reading, but I’m hoping her next book, “Flash and Bones” will be a redemption for me.

“Templar Salvation” is the sequal to “The Last Templar” and features the same main characters on the pursuit of lost Templar treasure, which as in the first book, is irrevocably lost to the Mediterranean sea, or is it?

I really enjoyed “The Last Templar,” it was a fun read and had a lot of interesting twists and turns.  It came out around the time that “The DaVinci Code” came out, and is sometimes compared to that novel, but although both seem to deal with Templarism in some respects, they are quite different stories.  And “Templar Salvation” tells us the tale of the supposed treasure trove of ‘codices’ that would put the Templars back on the top as a band of Warrior Monks.  Unfortunately for me, the reach seemed a little far to really catch on two.  Where “The Last Templar” linked it’s clues together well with good deduction and path following, “Templar Salvation” used a few too many “leaps of faith” for me.  It was still a good book, but not as good as the first.  And the closing bit just seems a bit to happy to suit the end of the last novel.

Sorry for taking so much of your time, hopefully next week I’ll have finished “The Scarlet Letter” and I’ll let you know what I think.

Ok, it’s August, and I’ve not posted anything since, what January?  I’m not evil, just easily distracted.

I have been reading, as a matter of fact, I’ve been reading a lot, and in more forms than before.  Yeah, I have books, and kindle on the Nexus One, but I’ve also got the lovely internet and Magazines and the newspaper.  Yeah, I”m back to actually reading the daily news on black and white paper that smudges all over your fingers.  Shouldn’t they have fixed that by now?

Books, both e and not, have been read by the bucket load, I’ll list a few and see if you’ve even heard of them.  Should I separate the books by type?  Ah whatever.

I re-read the Baseball story “Ballpark Blues,” that C.W. Tooke wrote, and was disappointed that he didn’t write anything else.  I did a quick search for him online and apparently he’s a journalist who only wrote the one novel.  I’m hoping he still has some more words to write, because I found the novel quite entertaining.  I’ve read it twice, and that’s always a good thing…  But then again, I read a lot of books twice.

There was also a number of books found on the discount table at Indigo that I particularly enjoyed.  I try to look there for books to try that I might not want to take a chance on spending 10-15$ on normally.  Getting 3 books for 10$ can’t be a bad idea, and the books purchased lately were “Devil’s In Exile” by Chuck Hogan, as well as a William Shatner penned novel about Kirk and Spock in their early days called “Star Trek Academy : Collision Course.”  The Shatner novel may have been actually penned by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, they’re credited as “Collaborators”.

Other books found and read over the past few months include a few classics that were free downloads on the Kindle App on my cellphone, including “Treasure Island,” “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and most recently, “The Scarlet Letter.”  All of these stories are good, but take a bit of getting used to if you’ve been reading contemporary fiction.  The language has either evolved, or devolved, since they’ve been written.  I’ve also got a Kobo App, cause I want all the free books I can get my hands on, and have downloaded and read, including some Star Wars novellas which I found to be very good reads!

One thing I found by accident was a science fiction piece called “His Robot Girlfriend.”  I was surprised to find out later that it was considered an “Adult” read, but even if it does have a few suggestive passages, it’s still a pretty good find for a free book.  And it got me interested in other works that may have been written by this author, Wesley Allison.  I now have to see if I can find other works, and make sure I don’t get surprised by something a little more adult in nature.

Finally, my guilty pleasure read of the past month has been “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl who Played with Fire,” both by Stieg Larsson.  I’ve not yet read the third part of the Millennium Trilogy, “The Girl who Kicked a Hornets Nest” but plan on doing so just as soon as the paperback version is released.  Yes, I know some of you have suggested that I should just go out and buy the hardcover version, but I”ll wait, keep the set all looking similar. 

These are fantastic books!  I loved reading them, and had a few sleepless nights trying to put the books down.  They were my favorite reads of the summer, and it looks like I may be reading them again while waiting for the next one to come out.  The other bit of news/rumour I heard recently was that a fourth novel would be coming out, being finished by the late authors girlfriend.  I’ll keep an ear to the ground to find out more about that one.

On a final note, I’d love to hear something from someone on whether to keep the apps on the phone, or to go get a proper e-reader, and if I get an e-reader, which one?  The three contenders, as far as I’m concerned, are Kindle, Nook and Kobo.  Next week will see me get into a little more detail about the Millennium novels, and maybe have a new kindle find to report on.

You can rarely get enough of it..  It’s true, and this past two months (yikes!  it’s already been 2 months) have seen me devour a number of books, and wonder where I had the time stored to do this.  I was supposed to be teling you about them, and then I just got busy reading, programming and paying attention to the family.

Yes, paying attention to the family is important, and then we go to a bookstore together and the drug kicks back in and I want to buy more, and more and more….  yes, it’s almost a disease!

But I did read a number of interesting books, and got started on some in somewhat unusual ways.  As it turns out there’s more than one way to read a book, but you knew that already.  My new smartphone (Google Nexus One, for those who are interested.) has a “Kindle” app.  Yes, download books to your smartphone and read on the somewhat small screen.  Not that hard to do actually…

I was first introduced to kindle by my Brother in Law, who got himself a Kindle (the real thing, not an app) and showed it to me when we went down to DC for Thanksgiving.  I actually like the kindle, it’s a nice size and the text is easy to read with the colors used.  I thought to myself I may have to get myself one of those.  Then the week after we got back, I decided that it was time to upgrade our cell phones, only now they’re called mobile phones, or smartphones, right?  I guess a writer should pay attention to the language, no?  So because our service provider was launching a new network, we got the pick of the litter for free.  niiice…. 

So we both chose the Google Nexus One, and I played with just about every app I could think of that could be even remotely useful to me (or fun for that matter) and also found a great readers app.  No, not just the kindle app, which is great, but a wonderful little app that lets you keep track of your books.  The Book Catalogue is a handy app that will scan the barcodes of your books and create a nice little database of all the books in your collection.  I gave the phone to my daughter who started with the books hanging around my desk, and the number of books catalogued reached 50 very quickly.  Next are the bookshelves and there’s 4 of those, some shelved double depth.  Yeah, I’m a reading addict all right, or maybe a book addict.  But I read all the ones I have, and have read them more than once, uh, more than twice I’d say… 

The handy bit about this app is that it goes with you, when you’re at the bookstore, and you see yet another novel by some prolific author (Hey, is that a new Stephen King Novel I spy!)  you can immediately see if it’s indeed already in your collection.  Will save me those awkward moments when I go back to the store and sheepishly admit I had already purchased that novel the other day, just didn’t get around to reading it yet…

So what have I been reading while I was away?  For starters I stumbled upon a couple more of those lovely Angie Sage Books.  I had read Magyk to the children a year or so ago, and fell in love with the characters.  They’re fun and well written.  So I read “Flyte” and “Physik”, because I have to catch up, there’s another 3 more I thinbk, and I’ve got other series to catch up on as well.  I picked up Stephen King’s “Full Dark, No Stars” which is a collection of 4 novellas, as well as some more Anne Rice novels “Queen of the Damned” and “The Tale of the Body Thief.”  Actually, I haven’t quite finished reading the last one yet.  More to the point, I haven’t finished “Queen of the Damned” yet.  I’ve got to try to keep my reading in order.

But I did finally finish readin the amazing french book “Le Premier Jour” which ended on the most ridiculous cliff hanger ever!  No, not funny ha-ha, but ridiculous in it’s one of those “Who shot J.R.” cliff hangers.  the book ends with our hero finding out that his love may not have died after all and heads off to parts unknown to try and find her!  Whether he does or not is unknown, I’ve yet to beg my sister in law to borrow the next book in the series (and I’m sure there’s a number of them, the way they’re well written and very well liked)

Course now I find myself in an awkward position, do I continue reading these borrowed books, or do I go out and buy them for myself?  They’re good, very good.  They’re so good in fact that I want them for myself.  But I’m like that with many books, and that’s why I have these rather overflowing bookshelves full of books, and I’m running out of room to keep them all.

Well, the books are amazing, and I’ll put in a few notes about all the ones I’ve read over the “holiday” and let you know just what I think of each one of them.  This probably means I”ll have to double post during the week, maybe a tuesday/thursday thing until I catch up.  Meanwhile, continue your own reading, I know, it’s an addiction, and even though we both know that, neither of us is going to tolerate an intervention.

Ah, there’s something about reading that just makes it all worthwhile.  Everytime I open up a book, even it it’s one I’ve opened up before, I find something that tickles my funnybone, and makes my life just that much more enjoyable.

Take “Le Premier Jour” for example.  This past few weeks I’ve been reading it and enjoying it very much, so much so that I’m getting to the stage where I just don’t want to put it down!  That’s always a problem, cause once in a while you have to sleep, even if you *need* to get to the end and find out how it all turns out.  Some of you flip to the last page and spoil it, but I just can’t make myself do that.

And of course, along the way, there are little gems to be discovered.  And boy did I find one this week!

It’s a wonderful part of the book that tackles head on a controversial issue of the day, and does so with a lightness that makes it funny and sweet.  Adrien goes home to visit his mother, and while there she notices a necklace that he has with him in his luggage.  She asks when he got it and he tells her “a friend” left it at his apartment.  She smiles knowingly and proceeds to leave him alone.  That’s where things start to go a little sideways…

Not a lot sideways though, just a little bit.  While on his visit to his mothers for a few weeks, he’s visited by his colleague from work, Walter, and though Walter knows which island Adrien is staying, he doesn’t know exactly where, so proceeds to make himself known, and that he’s looking for Adrien.

Mom assumes that this is “a friend” of Adrien’s, and starts playing cupid.  Yup, mom thinks Adrien is in a same-sex relationship, and rather than get all worked up over it, and upset and calling the local priest to “drive out the demons,” she accepts it, and tried to make it into a stronger relationship…

But she does so very delicately, without being obvious in the least.  The problem is, there is no such relationship, and Adrien is completely in the dark as to her machinations.

It’s warmly written, both mom and aunt Elana try their best to stoke the coals of this relationship, delicately here and there trying to be a good mother and make their lives happy.

I like this for 2 reasons, one, it’s absolutely perfectly written.  The timing, the dialogue, the settings the descriptions, everything fits perfectly to give you a real sense of how Adrien’s mom feels and how much she really wants to help her son with his relationship.  This really makes you feel almost part of the family even, the way it’s written.

The other reason is it does exactly what Adrien’s mom does, it makes no big deal of a same-sex relationship.  For me, this makes perfect sense, frankly I’ve never really understood those who saw reason to get upset, or cause a ruckus just because someone is in such a relationship.  I’m not so “small-sighted” to not see that the world is a huge place, and all sorts of different people populate it.  We firstly don’t all look alike, and we secondly don’t all act alike.  And heaven help us if we did!  This entire passage sums up my whole view on this topic, let it be, encourage love wherever you find it, and live your life.  At the same time, let those who want to live theirs, live them.  It’s incredible that we as a people feel we should change everyone else to our point of view, and to live the way we live. Let it alone, you’ll be surprised at how pleasant live can be when you do.

Ray