I’m late, I’m late! or a Tour of the Stack of Books on My Night Stand.

After being sick a good portion of the weekend, I have been feeling pretty run down and seem to be fighting off a 2nd pending illness with a diminished immune system. Or I assume this is the case as it’s usually how my body works. So I’ve been trying to get plenty of rest and fluids and vitamins and all that.  In that theme, I laid down for a nap around 5 this afternoon, with the intention of only sleeping for an hour or so.. but 4 hours later…

The rest is good, but of course, now I am not quite ready to go back to bed. I took some melatonin and am going to jabber here until, hopefully, the desire to sleep kicks in.

I don’t have one thing in particular that I want to talk about.

I’ve been watching American Horror Story and it started out as a really great fucked up combo of horror and soap opera style family drama. But tonight, eh… I can’t even really tell you much about what happened. I think what this series had going for it was the secrets, the mysteries, the ‘what in Pete’s name is going on here,” well and of course… Dylan McDermott jerking off naked . They should revisit that… cuz my attention is wandering.

I was watching The Daily Show last night and Bill Clinton was on. He’s got a new book out called Back to Work. I am pretty weary of politics and the economy, but this seems like it will be interesting to pick up. Of course, I am not allowed to buy anymore books until I get throughthe …6…ok 7 books on my nightstand.

I kind of have the same problem with books that I have with candles. Although I do actually, eventually, get through the books. These are outside the books that I need to read for work. I don’t count those. I have started carrying a book in my purse again, in an effort to get through the stack. You’d be surprised how much reading you can get in while waiting to pick up the kids or waiting for appointments… waiting waiting waiting.

Right now I’m working through a reasonably entertaining FBI mystery called Tailspin by Catherine Coulter. I picked it up off a bargain shelf for$3, I think. I am pleased to say that so far it’s been far more than $3 worth of entertainment. My only real complaint is that one of the bad guys is named Laurel.

I’m also about 30% of the way through Role Models by John Waters. So far it’s quirky and wonderfully amusing in a way that only John Waters can achieve. It’s very much like his movies in that he picks people like Manson girl Leslie Van Houten, to write about, but you realize along the way how astute he is in his choices and how remarkable the people he writes about really are. His point seems to be that our judgement of people based on singular events or only a few pieces of information results in a superficial characterization that teaches us nothing about who someone really is.

Then there’s Richard Preston’s The Wild Trees. I’ve had this one for awhile and had read about half of it before it got stuffed on a shelf somewhere and forgotten. So I started over, reading from the beginning. It’s a brilliantly told non-fiction narrative of a group of people who climb trees. Well, really big trees. The redwoods of the West coast are an obsession for this small band of botanists who climb them, sleep in them,and  risk falling to their deaths to explore the mysterious world that has gone unnoticed by man for centuries. What you might expect to be a bit dry and boringly scientific is actually a truly interesting story with much drama and excitement.

I’ve not yet opened Hitch 22 a memoir from Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, but maybe I’ll write an update once I do.

I’m 50 pages into The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt. He wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,  and this time, he finds himself in Venice after a fire has destroyed the historic Fenice Opera House. Venice is proving to be just as character-rich and filled with secrets as Savannah was in Midnight.

Another book still waiting on me to find page one, Them by Nathan McCall, if I recall, is a story of a rundown, traditionally African American neighborhood in Atlanta that’s being fixed up and invaded by … *gasp* white people. I’m told it’s a fascinating look at the gentrification of an urban neighborhood from the point of view of those who called the place home before someone came along to fix it.

Finally, Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinksi is a first-time novel set in lush Thailand. A journalist accompanies his girlfriend as she travels to Thailand to work and finds himself hunting down the details of a complex story of a woman who has committed suicide in a Thai prison. Half way through, I am still not entirely sure if this book is building to something surprising or is simply an interesting story with pleasantly unclichéd characters.

Well, that’s the list, for now. Good thing too, because I am suddenly feeling very tired and hopefully I can get a semi-decent night’s sleep. See you here tomorrow!

 

 

Tagged as: books, NaBloPoMo