But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he had been and things he has done since the last time he saw you.

~Stephen King, Salem's Lot

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10:41

Ooff. Well. I finally finished this gem a few weeks ago. It started out a lovely story, so well written and evocative of a time and place in history that makes reading historical fiction such a pleasure. But the tangents! Oh man. The first one came and went almost unnoticed as I was in such a haze of delight with the characters and story, but by the third and fourth one I was on to Charlotte's methods and started skipping large swaths of text just to get back to the actual timeline. It's too bad, really. I wanted to like this book so much that I broke with my rule of no guilt abandonment when tedium sets in (life is too short etc. ) Is there any truth to the old custom of paying authors by the word back in the day? or by the weight of the book? One can certainly see why tangents were popular for them.

Anywhoo. I'm on the fence with Villette. It's a lovely historic read if you can tolerate disorienting tangents.

So, as an antidote to classic literature, I chose this piece of modern fluff just for the sheer, easy reading fun of it. I like Gillian Flynn. I've read all three of her twisty psychological thrillers, especially Gone Girl the one that made her famous. Her writing is decent and well-paced and covers some pretty interesting aspects of human nature, although I find her use of gruesome imagery a bit much.

And then there's this one. I don't know if I qualify as an insomniac per se, but I do flirt with it on a regular basis. My nights are a series of intense but brief 'naps' interspersed with wakeful periods in which I usually read on my phone or ruminate in the dark over life's trivialities. So it was one night at 3am when I perused the website Brain Pickings on my phone and this book Sleep Demons by Bill Hayes came up as a feature of interest. It sounded like something I needed to read. I found a copy the next day at my library (actually, it was an interlibrary loan so although I 'found' it in the catalogue, it had to be brought in from another branch.) A few days later I had it in my hands and have been reading it ever since. It's wonderfully engaging and oh-so interesting! The author recounts his own experience with sleep, or the lack thereof, and weaves in some history, lore, and scientific studies. Just the kind of non-fiction I like to read.




After these? I don't know. I'd still like to keep going with the classic authors, I just need to hook up with one that clicks. I had my hand on Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad at the library the other day. Anybody read it? It looks like something I'd enjoy.

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13:39

Just a few of my favourite spooky classics to wrap up the season. These are all well worth a read. You may find, in fact, that they are so good you'll be wanting to re-read them every October.

I'd also have to give Stephen King an honourable mention here, but he and I had a small falling out when he got too gory. I don't do gore well and think it is quite unnecessary when the story is good and has a solid creep factor.

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07:54

Not sure where I'm going with any of these: some of them were given to me, and one is from my own bookshelf. Being Mortal is so far winning my attention right now. It's an eye opening read for anyone facing old age either for themselves or through a parent or other loved one. What am I saying? EVERYONE will be confronted with this at some point in their lives. It's quite an important subject in a well written book by world renowned physician and author. He knows of what he speaks.

Alaska is an epically fun weekend read. The fictional story behind it is kind of dated and cheesy, but the rest is packed full of history and geology and other stuff that makes your brain expand with all the knowledge.

The Illegal is one I've not yet picked up but looks like a ripped-from-the-headlines good read.

Onward.

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10:04

I love this book. I immediately passed it on to others I know who would appreciate an honest in-depth look at grief and what it can do to a family. A heavy topic, I know. But wow. After reading Wild and loving it for the honesty and insight into human nature, determination and vulnerabilities, I knew that anything else she wrote would be well worth reading. Her characters and settings are just so real you can feel their presence.

In her debut novel, Torch, bestselling author Cheryl Strayed weaves a searing and luminous tale of a family's grief after unexpected loss. Theresa May Wood has fled a bad marriage and rebuilt a life with her children, Claire and Joshua, and their caring stepfather, Bruce. Their love for each other binds them as a family through the daily struggles of making ends meet. But when they receive unexpected news that Theresa, only 38, is dying of cancer, their lives all begin to unravel and drift apart. Strayed's intimate portraits of these fully human characters in a time of crisis show the varying truths of grief, forgiveness, and the beautiful terrors of learning how to keep living.

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11:30

Even though I made it over half way through Jonathan Evison's The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, I just couldn't finish it. Ugh. It was predictable, for starters, and also just too . . . oh I don't know . . . trying too hard to be tender but 'real'? It was a forced kind of authentic. I'm usually wary of books with long convoluted titles (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, anyone?) so Revised Fundamentals must have snuck in under my reading radar. Isn't there a writing rule somewhere that recommends using fewer words whenever possible? A less-is-more kind of thing? I think that should apply to titles as well. The books themselves might be okay, it's just this one wasn't.

Anyway, moving on.

Before Wild, Cheryl Strayed wrote a novel called Torch, an emotionally heavy book about how cancer can wreak havoc on a family. I loved Wild and knew I would be reading everything else this author writes. So here I am reading Torch and loving it so far.

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11:55