Changing Tactics

Man, it's been awhile.  I have to get better at this.  Since last we spoke, I have been a reading machine.  The last book I wrote about, way back when, was Storm of Swords, the third installment of the Song of Ice and Fire series.  Since that epic marathon read was complete, I switched back to my hero's work, Stephen King.  Strange hero, yes, but hey, the man knows how to spin a yarn.


Listed, in order of completion, are the books I have read over the past six or so weeks:

Rage, by Richard Bachman (AKA Stephen King)
Night Shift (Short Stories), by Stephen King
The Stand, Complete and Uncut, by Stephen King
The Long Walk, by Richard Bachman (AKA Stephen King)
The Dead Zone, by Stephen King
Firestarter, by Stephen King
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

and currently 300 pages into World Without End, by Ken Follett


Yes, I know, I went on a bit of a Stephen King binge.  I decided one evening a few months back to read everything he's written in order that he wrote it.  But, I find there is only so many books by one author that a person can read in a row before that person needs a break.

So I decided to stop at Firestarter, because for me personally, that opened up a new chapter in the Stephen King lexicon.  What chapter could that be?  Well, Firestarter was the first book that Stephen King published after my birth.  I was born on September 3, 1980.  Firestarter was released in hardcover on September 29, 1980.

You might be wondering what the title of the blog is referring to.  Earlier today, I reintroduced myself to Goodreads.  Its a website focused on books, kind of like a Facebook for Readers.  It has been a solid two years since I really got on an explored the site, and I have to admit that it seems to have become a much better and easier site to navigate.  So I am making the decision to transfer all my book reviews to that site.  I will continue to blog about various things, for those that like to read the dribble of a young man with a little too much time on his hands.  Maybe I'll write about sports, or television reviews (though I don't tend to watch much television), or the nature of man.  Or maybe I'll write about my adventures in Genealogy.

So if you want to keep up with my book reviews, feel free to come on over to Goodreads and look for James Peavler.  If you like reading everything else that might go on in this brain of mine, stay here for any and all future installments.

Short and Sweet

I'll try to keep this one short and sweet.

I hate reading books that are a series.  Well, check that.  Hate is a strong word.  I despise series.  Yet, I read a great many books that are part of a series.  My rule to this is that I do not normally start a book until the last book has been published and I can sit and read it all the way through without being thoroughly annoyed when there is a cliff hanger ending or that feeling of wanting more and not being able to have it.

I sat and read all seven Harry Potter books, beginning to end, in about a three week time period a few years ago.  I loved them.  And I do not have that annoyed feeling of wondering what will happen next.  I did not have to wait a year or two between each book.  I did not have to go back and skim over the previous book to remind myself what had happened before picking up the next book.

The quandary I face today is that I have hungrily devoured the first three book of the Song of Ice and Fire series, and I am having a hard time restraining myself from picking up the fourth book, which will inevitably lead me to the fifth book -- only to leave me what?  Hanging?  Annoyed?  Frustrated? And the worst part of this is that George R. R. Martin is a notoriously SLOOOOWWWW writer.  Game of Thrones was published in 1996.  Clash of Kings and Storm of Swords came along fairly quickly, published in 1999 and 2000, respectively.  The fourth book, and the one I am currently hesitant about picking up and starting, A Feast for Crows, was not published until 2005.  The last published volume, A Dance with Dragons, came out just recently in 2011.

At his current rate, Martin won't finish and release the sixth book (of the planned seven books) until 2016 or 2017.  If I pick up the fourth and fifth book now and plow through them, will I be thoroughly annoyed and angry and have to let that anger and annoyance stew for 5+ years?

Inevitably, I am going to read the remaining published books.  Inevitably, I am going to be angered and annoyed.  And this will serve as a reminder to myself never to pick up another series again until all planned books have been published.

Just to Clarify . . .

So I seemed to have opened up a Pandora's Box with my last post.  What I started out writing was about my love affair with westerns in my youth.  Off hand comments about John Wayne seem to have upset a few people who took the time to read my diatribe.  Let me clarify my position from a few days ago.

I loved John Wayne, and still love John Wayne and his movies.  He is an iconic American.  He made great movies.  But, his movies became somewhat campy in the mid-sixties almost through to the end of his life.  His best movies were made in the 40's and 50's, movies like The Searchers, Sands of Iwo Jima, Red River, Fort Apache, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon . . .  the list could go on and on.  Can any of you name a truly great movie he made in the last part of the Sixties or the Seventies?  He made two horrible detective movies, Brannigan and McQ, which was a ploy of the studios to try and piggy back on the success of the Dirty Harry films (which John Wayne wanted to star in, but the producers felt he was too old to play the character, and subsequently gave it to Clint Eastwood).  Obviously there were exceptions -- The Cowboys come to mind -- but most of the movies he made towards the end of his career would have been mostly forgettable movies, if they had not starred John Wayne.  Although I have been chastising his work in the Seventies, in my opinion, he did find redemption at the end . . .

His final two films, Rooster Cogburn and The Shootist, were two of the best of his career.  The banter between he and Katherine Hepburn, who wanted to work with John Wayne in atleast one film before either of them retired, is the stuff of celluloid legend.  The Shootist, John Wayne's final film, was a good bye film.  Contrary to popular belief, John Wayne did not know he had cancer while filming the movie.  He had undergone procedures in 1964 that removed his lung, and was declared cancer free a few years later.

His character was that of a dying gunfighter, diagnosed with an incurable cancer.  Instead of withering away and dying a slow and painful death, he decides to go out on his own terms.  There was a line in the film that has always stuck with me since the first time I heard it as a kid.  John Wayne, gasping for breath after shooting a man who tried to sneak into his room, tells the character, played by Lauren Bacall, "I'm a dying man, afraid of the dark."

John Wayne died before I was born, so when I first saw the movie, I had the knowledge that this was his last movie, and that he would be gone just three years after filming this scene.  I felt, as I was watching him utter these words, that he was not acting.  To me, it was one of those eerie moments on a movie screen, the moment when John Wayne was reluctantly telling the world goodbye.

To retrace and head back to the basis of this blog, mainly books, I have to say that I have had a fairly voracious reading habit the past few months.  After finishing Dead Man's Walk (which I highly recommend to fans of books, not just fans of the western), I decided to take a break from westerns for awhile and went back to Westeros.  I flew through A Storm of Swords, the third book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, better known to everyone as Game of Thrones.

Once again, wow.  Just wow . . . just when you think you might know where the story is going, something happens (usually someones unexpected death) and you are left saying to yourself, "What the f . . .?"

I've been watching the second season on HBO.  It's been true to the books as well as a television series can be to a 1000+ page book, and it has been quite enjoyable.  I even ordered the graphic novel of the first book and am anxiously awaiting its arrival.  I am finding it a fascinating study in the different forms of media that the same story can take.  And I see, from what Amazon is suggesting for me, that even more media is out there for consumption for those who are obsessed with the land of Westeros.  There is a board game, a cookbook of food inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, CD's of music inspired by the books, books on the philosophy and logic of the stories, satire books and videos . . . the only thing that seems to missing is action figures of the characters.  I don't know about you, but I'd love a little action figure of Peter Dinklage to adorn my desktop.

And with that, I will leave you for the day, an image of a Peter Dinklage action figure in your mind.  How do you picture his action figure looking?  Is he wielding an axe?  Is he dressed in armor, or a red and gold cloak of House Lannister draped over his every day wear?  Or does he come with a glass of wine?

It's Been Nearly Two Months!

Wow, I am a horrible blogger!  Its not like I don't have anything to say.  I guess I am just being lazy and a bit antisocial lately.  Logging onto a computer means checking email; checking email means interacting with people; interacting with people means . . . well, talking to people. Ew, who wants to do that.

Anyway, I think I am a bit out of that funk, as this blog would attest to.  I am back on a computer, back to talking to people, back to the human race.  Hell, I am sitting in a Starbucks in Santa Rosa, CA, inside a Barnes and Noble bookstore writing this.  Surrounded by people.  It's a bit refreshing.

What have I been up to the past two months of solitude?  I haven't really been antisocial -- that was my attempt at sounding cool, like some introverted, J.D. Salinger-type author who can only take a moment or two to acknowledge people before burying my head back in the sand and hoping people forget me while I work on the next great American novel.  

I spent a week in New York City at the end of March.  It had been well over a year since I visited the Big City.  It welcomed me a last gasp bitter chill of winter.  I was caught walking between Ninth Ave and Seventh Ave in a rainstorm of epic proportions at 1am and spent the remaining days fighting the onset of a savage cold.  I was in town for a dear friend's nuptials.  It was a beautiful, 1920's themed wedding and offered me an opportunity to dress like a snappy gentleman.  One of the guest told me I looked like a gangster on Boardwalk Empire, which I gladly accepted as the highest of compliments.  

I'd be lying if I said that I did not miss New York City, even just a little.  There was a sort of ease at being able to hop on a train and go where you needed to go.  There was a comfort at knowing that no matter what you needed, you could find in the City if you just took a few moments to look.  I needed a nice fedora for the wedding.  I had something specific in mind.  I had hunted around the Bay Area in a fruitless search.  When I arrived in New York, I got my handy dandy smartphone out, went on Yelp, typed in Fedora, and twenty places popped up, from second hand thrift stores to vintage clothing.  One, near the bottom of the list, was a shop on Fifth Ave near the Empire State Building that specialized in hats.  I found the perfect hat, at an incredibly perfect price.  As I walked out of the store with my giant hat box in hand, I thought to myself, "Only in New York City."

Because I went mid-week, many of my friends and former colleagues were toiling away in their offices, so I had quite a bit of spare time on my hands.  In all that time, I whittled away the hours by doing what I like to do best.  I read.  

Thinking back my previous blog, where I talked about my relationship with Stephen King and how it was born in my wee youth, it got my mind on a nostalgic road, reminiscing on what I used to read as a child and a teen.  I grew up in a household that owned every John Wayne movie available on VHS.  My grandmother had shelves full of VHS tapes that she had recorded John Wayne movies on.  When one would come on AMC, she would pop a tape in and press record and meticulously pause the recording when a commercial would interrupt the movie.  Then, whenever she felt like watching Hatari, Hondo, or True Grit, she could just find the VHS, pop it in and press play.

Occasionally, she would record a non-John Wayne movie.  I remember one evening I was watching a movie called The Ox-Bow Incident and about half way through the movie, I asked her, "Where's John Wayne?"

She looked at me a bit confused, and said, "John Wayne isn't in this movie.  His name is Henry Fonda."

I thought she was joking.  "John Wayne is in every western."  I told her confidentially.

She laughed.  I sat and watched that movie all the way through, wondering when John Wayne was going to make an appearance.  If you know the story of The Ox-Bow Incident, you know its about a mass mob trying to lynch a man.  As the string him up and he hands a letter to Henry Fonda to deliver to his wife, I knew that this was the moment John Wayne would come riding in and save the man and shame the mob.  But he did not.  In my young mind, I found that the fact that John Wayne had not come in and saved the day more devastating than the fact that an innocent man had been lynched.

After reading a couple of Stephen King novels, Cujo was the first, followed by Cycle of the Werewolf (which I picked up because it had pictures in it!) I decided that I was in a bit over my head with these types of books.  The Lonesome Dove miniseries was a huge hit around this time, and surrounded by a family obsessed with westerns, I picked up my first Louis L'Amour novel.  I can't remember which one to save my life, but I know in the following years, I probably read nearly all of his novels, as well as Lonesome Dove books, Max Brand, and Zane Grey.  After I read my father's stash of westerns, I borrowed books from my uncle. Once I had gone through what he had, I borrowed from my grandmother.  Although many of the books were formulaic, I loved them.  I guess I felt about westerns as a spinster feels about Harlequin romances.  There was a world beyond my reach, a world I wanted to live in and could not, so I escaped into the books and movies.

I recently picked up Westword the Tide by Louis L'Amour.  I do not remember ever reading it as a kid. But I realized that as I picked up other books that I know I read, I don't remember them.  I think as a 10 year old kid, or an 11 year old or even older, I may have been reading all these books, but not actually absorbing what I was reading.  I wanted to read everything as quick as possible and move on to the next one.  So, although I may or may not have read many of these books as a kid, it's like reading something new all over again.

Specifically talking about Westword the Tide, I have to admit it was quite a struggle to read.  It was Louis L'Amour's first published novel (1950), and the story focuses on a wagon train heading west from Deadwood, South Dakota, into Montana.  One of the organizers may or may not have nefarious plans of killing and robbing all the members of the wagon train and only the main character seems to see the bad guy for who he truly is.  And all the while, the good guy and the bad guy are nearly coming to blows over a woman they both have fallen in love with.

It's a typical western, formulaic and to the point.  Yet I found the book difficult to read.  I usually will power through a book, despite how bad I feel it is.  But this one was difficult.  I put it down numerous times, not wanting to finish it, only to have it look back at me from its perch on the bookshelf, mocking me in a way for giving up on it.  I finished it . . . and was not surprised by how it ended.

I found the second book Louis L'Amour published, The Riders of High Rock, but could not convince myself to attempt to read it.  Instead, I picked up Larry McMurtry's Dead Man's Walk, his "first"novel of his Lonesome Dove Series, though it was the third novel he wrote in the series.  It was a thousand times better than Westword the Tide, not formulaic in any way other than its about Texas Rangers and they are dealing with Indians.  But making an appearance is the daughter of a Scottish noble, stranded at a leper colony in New Mexico.  I don't remember a Louis L'Amour character at a leper colony, or John Wayne playing a Scottish Noble (though he did have an unfortunate turn playing Genghis Khan in a horrible movie called The Conquerer).

Has my love affair with the western, a genre I lovingly recall from youth, became jaded with age?  I still enjoy a good John Wayne western, but even that was shaken recently by the Coen Brother's re-imagining of True Grit.  It's so much better on nearly every level than the John Wayne version (which John Wayne won his only Oscar for Best Actor) that watching his performance in that film is almost laughable.  He was playing his old stand by, drunken ornery cowboy with a heart of gold routine.  I had a conversation with someone recently about why I thought the Coen Brother's version was better, and when I commented on John Wayne being a comedic character compared to Jeff Bridges' incredible portrayal, the man I was speaking with looked ready to strike me.   I had blasphemed against John Wayne . . . how dare I!  I backtracked a bit on my comment, and said what I meant was I disliked Kim Darby and Glen Campbell in the movie, but John Wayne was able to carry the film despite them.  This seemed to appease him and saved me the trouble of trying to see through a blackened and swollen eye.

Nevertheless, what I found exciting as a child and teenager, I now find boring and (dare I say) trite.  I moved on from Westerns for now, but plan on revisiting them in the near future.  For now I will say ado, and hope to see you soon.

Stephen King and I

I promised at the end of my last post that I would write the next day. Obviously I got a bit sidetracked. It's been about ten days since my last post, but who's really counting?

Let me tell you a story -- a young seven-year-old boy, his hair a sandy blond shag that has not seen a pair of scissors in a few months, was walking through a Salvation Army with his mother on a late summer day. His mother told him to look through the books and pick one out while she perused the lightly worn clothing and furniture. The young boy is digging through the children's books, the heavy covers of Dr. Seuss bent with use, the cover of Sarah Boynton's Hippos Go Berserk! unfortunately torn so much that the boy tosses it aside with disgust. All the Berenstein Bears books he owned already and has read through them more times than he cares to count. Children's books are just becoming too boring for him.

He takes the opportunity to dig through the adult shelf, pulling down books with strange titles like The Mammoth Hunters, The Name of the Rose, . . . and the Ladies of the Club, and an entire shelf devoted to some lady named Danielle Steel. A book with a yellow jacket catches his eye. He pulls the musty smelling hardcover off the shelf and immediately the image on the jacket catches his attention. It's a picture of a dog's snarling muzzle, salvia dripping menacingly from its jowls. The title is a simple single word, which the young boy does not understand. Cujo.

The boy is intrigued. He opens the book up, skims the pages expecting to see pictures. All books have pictures, right? There has to be more pictures of the dog. What kind of dog is it? Why does it look mad on the jacket? What is a cujo?

But there are no pictures. Only black words typed on slightly yellowing pages, the first fifty or so slightly water damaged, as if someone had been reading it too close to the river and dropped it in the water for a split second before scrambling after it. The boy turns to the first page, and is immediately and unequivocally sucked in . . . Once Upon a Time (many of his books started like that -- this must be some sort of fairy tale book about a dog, he thinks). Not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. He killed a waitress named . . . IT is a fairy tale!!!

The boy slammed the book shut, ran to his mother and announced, "I want this book." His mother gave it a cursory glance and asked, "It looks like a big book. Will you be able to read it?"

"Of course," the boy replied, "It's about a dog. See?" He pointed at the image on the jacket. His mother gave it another quick glance, did not say anything and handed him a couple of dollars. "Here you go. Give this to the lady at the register. Tell her you're buying the book."

That night the boy sat down in bed, and his life was forever changed.

As you've probably figured out, the little boy was me. I don't know what my mother was thinking. I very seriously doubt she had ever heard of Cujo, or Stephen King, which was why she let me buy that book. Although I no longer have a copy of that particular book, I found the image to the right online, and this is exactly what I showed her that day. Whether my hands were somehow covering the image, or she just glanced at it, I don't know. All I know is that Cujo was the first adult novel I ever read and I have been hooked on books ever since. This is the reason I have developed a soft spot in my heart for Stephen King. You never forget you're first. I cannot remember just how many of his books I have read. I am guessing that over the course of the past 24 years (of active adult reading), I think I have read nearly all of them.

When I (re-)started this blog, I began by reading Carrie, his first novel published in 1974. I then moved on to 'salem's Lot (1975) and finished that in short order. I figured what the hell, why not read another one, and since I am reading them in order, I picked up a copy of The Shining (1977). I finished The Shining less than two hours ago, and needless to say I am a little creeped out. It's one book I had never read. I remember watching the Stanley Kubrick movie (Herrrrrrrreee's Johnny!) when I was somewhere around ten or eleven years old. As creepy as Jack Nicholson was in that film, it was the twin girls and the blood pouring out of the elevator that had scared me the most. For those reasons, I was hesitant to ever pick up the book.

I guess I was lucky enough to attend a pretty progressive high school. In the school library, nearly everyone of Stephen King's novels was available to check out. All through high school, instead of reading The Grapes of Wrath or Romeo and Juliet, or whatever great work of literature that I was supposed to read, I was checking out Stephen King books and reading them, as well as historical fiction novels like John Jakes' Kent Family Chronicles. The funny thing is, I earned my Bachelor's of Art in Literature, and a second Bachelor's in History. If you were to look at my high school grades, I consistently earned C's and D's in History and English. I was in my own world, reading what interested me, and ignored what the school felt I needed to learn. I did the bare minium to get by.

The Shining stood on the shelf of the school library, untouched by me because of some fear of creepy kids and bloody elevators and redrum. It was not until I was a 31 year old adult that I was able to tackle the book. As usual, the book is always better than the movie. Without giving too much away to those of you who have not read it, the book does not feature creepy twin girls, it does not have an elevator full of blood, and the novel is centered around a five-year-old boy, not his father as in the movie.

The book did not disappoint in the least. I loved it and regret not reading it earlier in life. For those of you that have watched the Stanley Kubrick movie, and loved it (despite what I believe was the miscasting of Shelley Duvall), I suggest strongly that you read the book. The story in the movie is so different from the story in the book that even if you think you know what is coming, you will more than likely be wrong.

I was thinking that I would change the focus of this blog, call it My Year with Stephen King, and logically the next story in the progression of Stephen King's career is a title he published in 1977 called Rage. Never heard of it, you may say. It would not be a surprise. He published it under his pseudonym Richard Bachmann, and he has since requested that it be taken out of print. It is Stephen King's only piece of written fiction that is out of print.

I will take a break from Stephen King, for now, while I track down this elusive story. I am switching gears, to a non-fiction yarn called A Crack in the Edge of the World. Written by Simon Winchester, at it's center is the devastation of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, with a good bit of tectonics thrown in for good measure.

So until next time, Thank You, and Good Night

It's Been a Few Weeks

Sorry, it's been a few weeks since last I was able to post. I was sick -- if it was not one thing, it was another. So what have I been up to since last we spoke? Genealogy and Stephen King.

About a year ago, I was tooling around on the internet, and remembered Ancestry.com. I was a member quite a few years ago, but lost interest for awhile in the whole genealogy thing. I ran into some dead ends and tripped over a few false leads. I continued to receive emails from them, those spammy type emails begging you to sign back up . . . hurry now, and you'll receive a two week free membership . . . then it became a month. What finally got me was three free months. So I signed up, and after a week or so of browsing and filling that family tree, I eventually lost interest again. Forgot about it, until the three months was up and I got an email from Capital One, letting me know there was a charge on my card for a bit of money. I checked my statement, and realized that with the three free months of Ancestry membership, I had also signed up for a one year membership (15 months for the price of 12!).

So over the past few months, I've dawdled here and there, digging through census records and public trees and tracing back family as far as the 1600's in Massachusetts. But something strangely incredible happened a few weeks back. I recieved a message through Ancestry from a woman named Natalie, in Woodland, CA. Woodland is located directly north of Davis, CA, and to the northwest of Sacramento. I-5 runs through the center of town.

Natalie is a photographer in Woodland, and was looking through photos in an antique store when she stumbled upon a photo of a Wilbur Francis Peavler. She very kindly mailed me the photo, which I have posted to the right. There were two gentlemen by the name of Wilbur Francis Peavler: Senior (my great-grandfather) and Junior (grandfather). After a minor bit of investigation, I came to the conclusion that this is a photo of Senior. Lightly written in pencil on the back is his full name, the cost of the photo (which was $1), his age (4 months) and Aunt Belle.

Aunt Belle seems to be the mystery. I can find no record of either of his parents having a sibling named Belle, or Isabelle, or any other variation of Belle. This has opened up a new chapter in my search and I have been spending free time digging through the Ancestry website.

In other news, I finished Carrie. The book was much better than the movie, filling in the blanks of her mother's insanity and the overall death toll was much higher. 4 out of 5 stars is my rating, as much for its entertainment value as for the thoughts it conjured while I was reading it. Its a quick, demented read about a young girl snapping.

It's interesting to think about Carrie from a modern perspective. Keep in mind, this was Stephen King's first published novel, released in 1974. In our overcharged society where any instance of school bullying is met with severe punishment, when everyone is so sensitive to the idea of school shootings and teenagers snapping, I could not help but wonder if Carrie would ever see the light of day in today's publishing world. If a young struggling English teacher at a Maine high school tried to publish a book today about a young bullied girl snapping and killing everyone at her high school prom, would that teacher be praised as a "modern master of horror" or would he be suspended without pay pending a psychological analysis? The opening scenes deal with menstruation in a high school shower. That teachers would be accused of being a pervert and chased out of town on a rail.

Carrie is one of the most challenged books in America. On a list of 100 books which was compiled by the American Library Association of the books that have faced the most challenges since 1990, a list that includes works such as Catcher in the Rye, the Harry Potter series, and American Psycho (as well as Cujo, another Stephen King work that I will be touching on in tomorrow's edition), Carrie was ranked as the 77th most Challenged book. The ALA compiled this list of books as part of Banned Books Week, and the books are ranked by the number of official challenges each title has faced in regards to being removed from library shelves.

So I ask again, if Stephen King were a young, thirty-something English teacher today, in the year 2012, would he be able to publish a book like Carrie? I honestly do not think a book like Carrie would see the light of day today.

Sticking with my old friend Stephen King, I decided to pick up, and have since, completed reading 'salem's Lot, Stephen King's second published novel, and his ode to vampire classics of the past. This is a real vampire book, there are no glittery vampires, no "vegetarian" vampires, no vampires living amongst humans and having crazy vampire sex. It's blood and gore and stays true to vampire lore. Catholic priests fighting with holy water, men driving wooden stakes through hearts, Van Helsing references -- all that was once good about the vampire genre.

But I will save that until tomorrow, good friends.

Hello, Good Reader . . .

Over the weekend I finished Clash of Kings. It was pitched battles and political intrigue to the very end. I guess I should rate it. Isn’t that what people are supposed to do when writing about other creative wo

In the spirit of Netflix reviews and Yelp reviews, I will base my very highly touted opinion on a numbering system of 1 to 5.rks? Give them some sort of numeric value so that when people go through and read their reviews, they don’t have to waste their time reading the whole thing. There’s just a number they can reference.

5: Awesome, amazing, life changing read that I will read over and over again. Very few books will or have reached this pinnacle of perfection. Some past reads that have garnered 5 coveted stars from me include the Harry Potter series (all 7 books I have read or listened to on audiobook format numerous times), Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, The Big Oyster by Mark Kurlansky, and Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon K

4: Awesome, amazing, exciting reads that I probably won’t bother reading again, but loved nonetheless.rakauer. If you haven’t read any of them, I highly recommend each and everyone.

3: Entertaining, had its moments, but all in all just an average book

2: Really, I wasted my time on this?

1: Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to print a piece of garbage like this.

There is will be no zero ratings, because there had to be some sort of redeeming value to the book that caught my attention enough to try and read it. If it was the cover that caught my eye, kudos to the designer. If the blurb on the back made it sound spectacular, kudos to the marketing department. If a friend recommended it, I need a new friend.

My first official grade for on this blog will be for Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin, the second book in

the “Song of Ice and Fire” series. Drum roll please . . .

4!

It was great, highly entertaining, one of a kind yarn. But whether it has to do with the length of the book (1040 pages!) or the fact its part of a long on going series, I don’t see myself reading it again in the future.

The unfortunate drawback in my life at the moment is that all my books are currently in boxes in the garages. A few have made their way inside, mostly mass market paperbacks and others that I have bought in the past few months since the move out of San Francisco. Monday morning, I was perusing my small shelf next to the front door and grabbed a copy of Carrie. I have seen the movie; I know the story, as do most of you. But I have never read the book. As we all know, books are always better than the movies. What I have discovered lately is that sometimes I find that watching a movie before reading the book makes the experience better. I know, it sounds a bit weird, but bear with me.

I recently read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series. I saw the Swedish versions and recently saw the David Fincher version. I found myself slightly disappointed with each version, because I started picking out things that they left out. Pivotal plot points just gone.

On the flip side, I remember not reading any of the Harry Potter series until the seventh book was released. Only then did I sit down and read each and every book back to back. I had seen the movies and found that I loved the books because the limited world I was introduced to in the movies opened up and seemed to become this living, breathing world. For those who had read the Harry Potter books before the movies, they always seemed to have the same complaints – they left this or that out. How could they leave that character out? How are they going to explain that in the later movies if they don’t at least touch on it now?

So Monday morning, I embarked on Carrie. I am nearly done with it already. It’s a short quick read, and the scary creepiness you see in the movie is multiplied ten fold because you actually see Carrie’s thought processes as she reacts to multiple events, including the infamous shower scene that starts the books.

So that’s it for now .

Have a lovely evening, good reader. I’ll see you next time