books

i'm a bit of a blog junkie. when there's alot of dead time between calls i make rounds on news sites and blogs. i don't know if it's bad blog manners to post on strangers' blogs, but i've done it anyway...but mostly when it's people who are friends with people i know. that makes it okay, right?

i was recently at a blog that had a nice book discussion going on. i really like books. no, really. last time i moved i had 8 boxes of them. i've been trying to minimize my collection, but it's sometimes hard for me to part with them. i've made it easier by giving books i love to people i like that i think will enjoy them. i find jane austen and cs lewis the most difficult to part with, but it's bad to be too attached to things.

i also have a nasty habit of getting myself into several books at once. i decided about a year ago to get back into classics and more challenging reading. i read my first classic in 5th grade (that was 20 years ago - good grief!!). i about frightened myself to death finishing treasure island by flashlight in under my covers ("pieces of eight! pieces of eight!"). i read robinson crusoe and oliver twist that year as well. reading was my favorite escape, and one of the nicest things i remember in my childhood was my parents reading us on many an evening. we read the narnia chronicles, the hobbit and lord of the rings trilogy, chesterton, williams' spiritual thrillers, agatha christi...i could go on.

i picked up war and peace last summer, and about the same time bought umberto eco's baudolino. i also started a edward rutherfurd novel in august called london. i found another copy of jane austen's sanditon that i'm dying to re-read, and i flew through red moon rising in january. i need to finish war and peace, but i get a bit yawn-ish in the battle parts and end up putting it down for weeks at a time. i'm about 3/4 through it, so i should just tough it out since i really like the non-battle parts.

baudolino is odd. it's the first eco book i've read and feels like a funny dream...you know the kind that starts out normal and ends with george washington chasing you through the grocery store on horseback, or some other such strangeness. it's really well written, if a bit vulger at times, but had me laughing out loud the first page. i really only have a few more chapters but it's so out there i've put it down for the last few months too.

london is a really cool book. like rutherfurd's other novels, this one takes a geographic location (london, i'm sure you figured that out) and follows it from pre-history to the present. it's historic fiction at it's finest. i'm such a sucker for history.

after that i'll be jones'n for something else to read. maybe a few somethings.