Song Lyric of the Day:
Oh simple thing where have you gone / I’m getting old and I need something to rely on / So tell me when you’re gonna let me in / I’m getting tired and I need somewhere to begin
Keane / “Somewhere Only We Know”
1:40PM.
I finally used my $20 Barnes & Noble gift card over lunch. My sister-in-law, Kirsten, and her husband, Chris, gave it to me for Christmas (thanks again, guys!). I bought ‘Til Death Do Us Part by Kate White; fortunately, it was priced about 30% off the publisher list price (I never buy books at list price). This is the third book in a mystery series featuring Bailey Weggins, a freelance journalist, who somehow ends up having to solve murders. Hopefully the book will arrive Monday.
I amassed a decent amount of books over the Christmas holiday, which is great, since I need to start really reading again. I’ve been struggling through The Rule of Four for three, maybe four, months now. It might even be longer than that. It’s become the albatross around my neck. I just can’t read more than a couple of pages at a time. The reviews that declared this a more literary The Da Vinci Code were way off. At least The Da Vinci Code was a fun read, whereas this book feels like work. Far from being more literary than TDVC (or anything else), The Rule of Four just can’t seem to find and hang on to a plot thread. The coauthors get distracted too often with subplots that add nothing to the book as a whole. Therefore, my interest ends up falling by the wayside. I might just have to shelve this one for another year or so and then try to go back to it.
I admit, I generally don’t read very literary books as a whole. Not because I have anything against literary books; I guess it’s just a personal prefence thing. I read to escape, and also to study authors’ writing styles. I have, however, read some books that are more literary than my usual fare (Memoirs of a Geisha), and am planning on reading more.
To give you an idea of my reading interests, here are some of the books I got for Christmas:
- Hour Game by David Baldacci – a political thriller
- The Christmas Thief by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark – a mystery with Christian undertones
- Ten Big Ones by Janet Evanovich – the 10th book in the Stephanie Plum comic bounty hunter series
- The children’s books If You Give a Moose a Muffin, Book the Sixth through Book the Eleventh in A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Falling Up.
- Books on candle making, women’s strength training anatomy, and learning how to gamble (and win!)
Books I bought for myself over Christmas at McKay’s Used Books:
- Gravity by Tess Gerritsen – a medical crisis set during a space flight mission
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold – a family drama dealing with the death of a daughter
- Fatal Tide by Iris Johansen – a thriller light on narrative and heavy on dialogue
So as you can, a literary critic I am not. I’m just a lifelong reader who loves books.
