I have a guilty pleasure to admit to. I read books written for teenagers. I feel so much more free now that I’ve admitted it. It’s been like a dirty, immature secret.

I just finished the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants trilogy plus one (what’s the word a 4 book series?) and I am still seething about Kostos. I know he and Lena weren’t together anymore but he was always so sensible. He should have known he was never going to find happiness with someone else’s ‘traveling pants’.

But now I’ve finished all four and I don’t know what to do with myself. With the cost of books, I refuse to try a new author without an excellent recommendation. And even though I was desperate enough to do it for the fourth book of this series, don’t expect me to EVER go back into the Knowasis (aka teen study room) at the library.

Ah, sweet angst ridden life….

I used to love to write. I fancied myself the author of a book one day. Just one book, though – I figured I could rake in the dough with just the one fabulously engrossing and wildly acclaimed book. I’d retire on the money I made by the age of 18 – no need for college (something I was against since the time I found out about it “What?! You told me I could drop out when I was 16, then you told me you’d kick me out if I did but that I could quit school after high school! Now you say that’s not enough! Do you want me to waste my life in school?” (door slams)).

Then I didn’t turn out to be as good a writer as I imagined myself. I had it all together in my head, but it took so long to write it, by the time I got to the end of a sentence, half the words were missing. Like that last sentence would have been, “I had it all together in my half the words were missing.” Or I would write myself into a corner and have to go back and redo everything only to realize it wouldn’t work anyway I came at it and then I’d have to scrap the whole thing and come up with a different idea. The second idea was never as good as the first (all my first ideas are brilliant).

I would write these dark short stories that brought me to tears. So heartfelt, so insightful, so utterly, utterly deep. (pause for somber effect). Then I would reread them and they would bring me to tears again – of embarrassment at the sappiness of it all – more like utterly, utterly silly.

In school, they always had a very precise formula to write by – topic sentence, concrete detail, commentary, commentary, concrete detail, commentary, commentary. Repeat five times and you had an essay. If you did not follow the formula, you got marked off for it which burned me up no end. Where was the option to write creatively? Why in the name of all that anyone holds sacred did I have to follow this BEYOND boring method and then hold HEMINGWAY up as a fine ideal? (How was I supposed to know what “Hills Like White Elephants” was really about? How could anyone know what that was really about? This is supposed to be GOOD writing?!) I used to rebel by refusing to reach the minimum word requirement. HAHA, that’ll show them!

Now adays I just write what comes to mind. I think they call it verbal diahrea but here I just call it wordiness cuz I don’t know how to spell diahrea. And, really, I don’t want to know how to spell it.

If you really want to read a scary book, read ‘The Coming Plague’ by Laurie Garrett.  It has very descriptive passages about the ebola virus and talks about diseases that you’ve never really heard of.  For example, ever heard of Lassa?  Or how about the Bolivian Hemorrhagic fever?  Pretty much anything with ‘hemorrhagic’ in it’s name is disgusting.    There’s a chapter that looks at the Hanta virus for those of you in Arizona.  Or Legionnaires’ disease for you readers out east.

Fascinating is a good way to describe this book.  I gave it to my mom to read when I was done with it but she didn’t like it.  I can’t understand why.  When you are done with this book, you will be a germaphobe who never wants to travel anywhere and feel desperate to find your own little cocoon to live in.  After a while, you’ll come out of it so don’t be too put off by that.

I’ll admit it – I’m Star Trek fan. In this household you either love Star Trek or you love Star Wars, but really not both. You tolerate the other person, but you’ll always wonder a little about their sanity. Anyway, I’m here to talk about Peter David. Who is this person, you may ask.  Why, only the best Star Trek author of all time, I will tell you. In my childhood, it was the Peter David Star Trek books we fought over most. We were only allowed one copy of a book and you had to register with the official owner to get in line to read it (and a long line it was). God help you if a slow reader was ahead of you – you might just as well wait for the library to get it and we all know that takes forever. Peter David’s books have made the New York Times Bestseller list so you know they’ve got to be good. But he’s not limited to Star Trek. He’s wrote the novelization of the first Spiderman movie and it’s impossible to tell how many comic books he has written. He even wrote a book about writing comic books. His writing is witty and heartfelt and most importantly, it is creative. If you don’t like Star Trek, maybe read ‘Sir Apropo of Nothing’ or ‘Tong Lashing’ – oh so funny.

I was lucky enough to get some books for Christmas to keep me occupied while waiting in the pick up line for my child after school.  I’m a big fan of books about math – I don’t mean text books but more like history books that deal with a math topic.  You may ask how I manage to pass the time with that kind of stuff but it’s really interesting.  I was thinking about how I got started on this weird path and that story comes with a book recommendation.  Many years ago it seemed like everyone was talking about Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ and I bought it just to see if I could get through it (I couldn’t), but as I checked out, the bookseller made note of what I was buying and suggested that I read ‘Einstein’s Dreams’ by Alan Lightman.  It’s a fiction book that is amazing.  It deal with time and the universe in small, poetically written snippets.  It is in no way overwhelming or dense and technical jargon is absent.  It is a beautiful book and I highly recommend it for anyone who likes even one of the following: literature, math, physics, philosophy, history, life, nothing.

I once heard a teacher say that she wasn’t allowed to test on anything that had to do with Algebra in her Geometry class because the vice-principal had said it wasn’t fair to do so since they are different subjects. Had she paid any attention to him, she wouldn’t have been able to test on anything since the two are really the same thing – one gives a visual representation of the other. She said she just kept on doing what she had been doing. The guy had shown such a profound lack of understanding on the subject, she doubted he would be able to tell the difference. I recently read a book about Descartes (the guy who unified Algebra and Geometry) and was reminded of this moment so I thought I’d share. If you have any interest in the history of Mathematics, consider reading a book or two by Amir Aczel. Man is this guy a great writer or what? If you do read his books, I’d say a good place to start is “Fermat’s Last Theorem”, though it was his “Descartes’ Secret Notebook” that inspired this post.

Another sci fi plot type that I can’t seem to get enough of is the amnesia plot.

I loved the Bourne books: way better than the movies. (The whole point is that he isn’t a hitman, geez!)

Also, my current read, The Paradox Men, has been very interesting so far.

And then there are all those Philip K. Dick books. Too bad he’s not around anymore.

Dean Koontz’s ‘Cold Fire‘ centers on the incredible talents of Jim Ironheart. Somehow Jim can tell when someone is going to die. He seems to have no control over this power. He just gets feelings that he needs to be in certain places at certain times to save some stranger from death. A reporter named Holly Thorn soon begins to suspect his involvement in multiple cases. Each one involves a mysterious stranger saving someone from certain death. Jim has never been too clear on what guides him to saving certain people. He just believes that it’s a higher power. Holly begins to suspect that something else is guiding Jim. What is certain is that there is another power, separate from the benevolent force guiding Jim to save others. This other power is dangerous and wants to prevent Jim and Holly from discovering the truth.

‘Cold Fire‘, like Stephen King’s ‘Blaze’, is told from a limited perspective, but unlike King’s work, this novel suffers from the limitation. Not only are Jim and Holly the only perspectives used, they’re almost the only characters in the entire book. I was very disappointed to see a promising premise devolve into cheap psychology. The idea of a man who is forced to travel the world because a voice in his head demands that he save people’s lives is an very interesting one. That got me hooked. The evolution of an interesting idea into a pedestrian one was very disappointing, especially with the lengthy explanation of every detail that composed the conclusion of the story.

So, for future reference, if you’re going to take a cool idea and start explaining it, make sure that your explanation is cool too.

I just finished reading (I guess ‘listening’ would be a more appropriate term, since they were audiobooks) ‘Blaze: A Novel‘ by Stephen King and Dean Koontz’s ‘Cold Fire’. Both books are fairly representative of each author’s work, but both also seem to be told from a fairly unique perspective.

King’s novel was released as one of the “Bachman” books that had been sitting in a shorter format, forgotten for decades before King rediscovered, rewrote, and published it. The novel is told almost exclusively from the perspective of Blaze, a hulking man with a dented forehead that has left with a somewhat diminished mental capacity. Blaze and his partner, George, are in the process of planning the ‘one, last, big score’. In this case the crime they are planning is the kidnapping and ransom of the infant grandchild of local millionaires. George is smarter, older, and more pessimistic than Blaze, but as the story unfolds, we also discover that he’s dead. The question as to whether George exists solely in Blaze’s head or in a supernatural form that guides Blaze’s crimes is constantly raised throughout the book.

The interesting perspective that this book takes is that there is essentially only one character. George is around and constantly talks with Blaze, but he’s not physically there. If this story is ever filmed, Blaze would be the only character that you see for most of the running time. Regardless, the story never suffers from this limitation. It occasionally moves through flashbacks, and these detours let us see more and more of Blaze’s tragic life. The end seems inevitable but is never strained like some of King’s other works. King sometimes seems to get a great idea for a story, but writes himself into a corner. His endings sometimes bare the scars of these literary cul-de-sacs as he struggles to wrap things up at the end. Books like ‘It’, ‘Salem’s Lot’, ‘The Shining’, and ‘Blaze‘ show King at his best throughout the entire novel. However, books like ‘The Stand’, ‘The Dark Tower’, and others leave me thinking that I liked the setup but wished the ending had been different. Kind of like a joke with a great setup, but a punchline that’s just not funny. In any case this is one of Stephen King’s stronger novels, exploring the tragedy of one man’s life.