Okay, so I haven't played many games in the past couple of weeks. Disheartened by the lack of worthwhile Virtual Console purchases of the past couple of months, and in general feeling a little underwhelmed by a lot of the freeware I've been checking out lately, I've turned to books for solace. And by that I mean I've been reading like a maniac the past two weeks. Seeing as how I'm broke and all, my strategy is this: scour the Science Fiction Book Club website, refusing of course, to purchase my featured selections, then putting anything interesting in my wish list there and reading through user reviews to see if it suits me. I cross reference the general feedback there with that of Amazon, often adding the same items to my wish list there so I can receive recommendations for other books I may be interested in. Then, I go to the local library's online website, and add the chosen books to my wish list there, or outright request them, depending on what I'm interested in. They give me a call when my shizzle is ready, so I roll a mile down the skreet and make the pick-up, gangsta style. I'm talking free books, yall. As long as I don't accrue late fees.
I'll start with A Dirty Job and Practical Demon Keeping by Christopher Moore, both very funny and light reads. He seems to have a thing for thrusting the everyman into the most bizarre occult/supernatural situations possible, and the results are almost Pythonesque.
I also read the first two books of Alan Campbell's Deepgate Trilogy, Scar Night and Iron Angel, both of which are bit stranger and bleaker than what I expect out of a fantasy novel. I then devoured two books by my current favorite fantasy author, Peter S. Beagle, A Dance for Emilia, a novella, and Tamsin, hands down the best ghost story I've ever read. I first read another of his ghost stories, A Fine and Private Place about a year ago, and loved it.
By far the best book though, has been The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson. An amazing bittersweet love story about a porn star who is hideously deformed after being burned in a car wreck, he finds meaning and love when he meets a mental patient who claims they were lovers in another life of his, though she herself is 800 years old. It get's really interesting and wonderful from there. If I had a top ten list for the best books I've ever read, this would be in it.
On the Sci-Fi front, I just discovered Robert J. Sawyer with his latest novel, WWW:WAKE, the first in a trilogy about a blind girl who, with the aid of experimental technology gains the ability to see, not reality at first, but the web itself--while at the same time, an awareness is forming in within cyberspace, and it's fate and consciousness is bound to that of the girl. I wasn't sure about it after reading the jacket, but it's was a great read, and I've added a few more of his books to my library que.
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My, my you have been a bookworm! I'm lucky if I can get through a book a month lately.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to check out Moore's work sometime. I seem to have one of them floating in my recommended stuff on Amazon. It's apparently about Jesus or...something.
I've never actually read any of Beagle's works. Or even seen The Last Unicorn all the way through. I feel rather ashamed.