Andy Deane’s “The Sticks”: A New Voice in Horror Fiction Tuesday, Nov 22 2011

Title: The Sticks
Author: Andy Deane
Length: 210 Pages
Publisher: Delerium Books
Publication Date: April 2009

There are certain things you expect to find on sale when you go to see a band play. Albums, obviously. T-shirts, of course. Bags, buttons, patches? Sure, why not! But books? Not so much. Finding a stack of horror novels on a band’s merch table may seem a little strange, but that is exactly how I came across The Sticks, a novel written by Bella Morte frontman Andy Deane.

The novel reads like a horror movie put to the page: a man is kicked out of a party where everyone seems to be taking themselves too seriously, and abandoned by his girlfriend to boot. When the girl in question seems to vanish, he and a fellow spurned partygoer set off to find her and get a lot more than they bargained for in theprocess as they nearly run down werewolf on a country road. Told from the protagonist’s perspective, thenovel is written in the first person, and the colorful language and thought process of Brian, the lead character, make the narrative both memorable and believable. The narrator is likable and carries a somewhat everyman feel, forced to deal with the hassles of weird neighbors, his missing girlfriend’s snobbish friends and even a car that proves far less than reliable. Brian is an ordinary guy – and a horror movie fan – caught up in some extraordinary circumstances, forced to fight for his life against an evil that no one else could possibly believe. Full of film references, the novel will be a delight for any horror fan to read.

Key to the novel’s success as a werewolf story is the fantastic description of the actual transformation. We’ve all seen a man change to a bloodthirsty werecreature in film and television, but it has rarely been put to page with such masterful description. Cracking bones, twisting flesh, a grizzled muzzle forcing its way forward: it just doesn’t get much better than this! The author doesn’t shortchange on the gore or bodycount either. This is a horror novel and that fact is never forgotten. The werewolf in question is a vicious, ravenous beast and it leaves a bloody trail of broken, bitten bodies in its wake. The novel is completely unapologetic in its use of gore and violence – just the sort of attitude needed for a great horror story.

Apart from being a little heavy on the use of similes, there is not much to complain about. The solid storyline would prove great fodder for a film, particularly so as lacking of decent werewolf films Hollywood has been since… well… just about forever. Deane’s writing career is just getting started, with only a few novels under his belt; if the others are as good as this one, we may be looking at a new force to be reckoned with in horror fiction.

CHECK PLUS: Fun story, likeable characters, great horror elements
CHECK MINUS: A little overboard on the use of simile
OVERALL RATING: A-

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REVIEW: Lost Echoes Tuesday, Jul 20 2010

Title: Lost Echoes
Author: Joe R. Lansdale
Length: 341 Pages
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publication Date: February 2007

There is an ageless quality to the beginning of Joe R. Lansdale’s novel, Lost Echoes. The opening to the main narrative – which arrives only after a newspaper clipping and a brief retrospective thought from the novel’s lead character – has a quiet sense of timelessness that could lead a reader to believe that this story could be taking place at any time in the latter half of the 20th century. An ill child awakens from a fevered sleep and wanders through a quiet house in the dark, reveling in his innocence by watching drive-in cartoons through his living room windows, parents all the while unaware. The sweetness of this picturesque scene is soon stripped away, when this single incident leads to a new talent that will haunt this child, young Harry, for much of his life.

The idea is fairly simple: the story of a young man, who, as a result of this childhood illness, sees and hears what is not there. Or, rather, what once was there, but has long since lapsed into the forgotten memories of countless villains and their hapless victims. Where Lost Echoes differs from a bevy of other paranormal thrillers is that the focus is not on the hero learning to use his gift to save the day, but rather learning to cope and bear the weight of knowing, seeing and feeling what others have left behind.

The novel is broken into three basic components, all centered around the story’s major player, Harry: a battle against the self, a battle against alcoholism and a twisted little mystery that draws both together. These major components of the story arc are oddly segregated, with the mystery crime-drama aspect relegated to the last and least important position. While the mystery of an accidental suicide that could be a murder, wrapped in the perfumed cloud of a returned childhood crush, is intriguing, it plays only  a supporting role to the real drama of the traffic hero Harry’s battle with his alcoholism and the terrifying visions – the title lost echoes – that come to him carried on waves of seemingly harmless sound.

This is in itself an intriguing idea, bring realism to the idea of a human being plagued by haunting visions of the past. Visionaries, psychics and mediums are a dime a dozen in fiction of a paranormal bend, but rarely do they possess such depth and reality. Lansdale presents Harry as sympathetic figure, plagued by visions he does not want and cannot stop. He is no sage mystic, using his supposed sight when and if he feels it necessary; he is just a tired, overwrought kid, attacked daily by a barrage of horrible images, vestiges of the inhumanity man wreaks upon himself and others. The evil med do, the author seems to subtly remind, can never truly die away, and while most can forget it with the passing of time, there are some, like Harry, who can never ignore it. He must deal with everything the rest of us leave behind; all of our fears, our horrors and our hates, invading the life and mind of the young man.

Unable to escape his gift – or, rather, curse, as Harry himself seems to see it – he draws himself into an obsessive compulsive cocoon of padded walls, planned ‘sage routes’ and avoidance. Anything he cannot control, Harry drowns in a flood of liquor, numbing his senses and halting the flow of the echoes that torment him. It is only after meeting a fellow barroom regular – an older man, perhaps representing the only future Harry will have if he continues on his self-destructive ‘safe’ path – and an unscheduled deviation from his normal routine that Harry begins to believe that there must be a better way. Enter Tad, a middle-aged martial arts master gone to seed, who drinks a nightly tribute to his own sad memories, a startling contrast to young Harry, who instead uses the alcohol to blot out and numb away everyone else’s lingering echoes. Together, the two embark on a quest to regain their control – find their centers – over their own lives.

Lansdale creates the world through Harry’s eyes – or, better, his ears; readers find the idyllic quiet of what seems to be modern day small town perfection shattered by the silent reverberating screams left only for Harry to see. Hidden here, and perhaps everywhere, are the dirty little secrets and softly spoken lies that are the underbelly of even the happiest of settings.

CHECK PLUS: Clever plot, interesting characters
CHECK MINUS: At times tedious
RATING: B

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Breaking [Down] Twilight Friday, Jul 9 2010

My personal disdain for all things Twilight has become pretty legendary in my circle of friends. Generally, I try to give everything a fair shake and if it’s not my cup of tea, I just don’t pay much attention to it beyond the first taste of it. With Twilight, however, there are a lot of issues that are just irking the hell out of me.

My first inclination was to ignore it entirely, as, at 27 years old, I assumed this was a Young Adult novel that I needn’t be concerned with. That is, until my sisters, in their thirties, some friends and even my boss, a mature woman in her fifties, all became agog at the supposed brilliance of this mediocre writer.

That in itself is one of my biggest issues. I personally know at least three people – two of whom, incidentally, have promised me a novel each that I have still yet to read, and I am looking at you here, Kate and Eric! – who could write circles around Stephenie Meyer and in all honesty are far more deserving of the sort of idolatry of their characters that is for some reason ascribed to a stalking sparkly vampire and an obsessive near-pedophile shapeshifter. But I digress.

To put it bluntly, I do not like Twilight. So I roll my eyes when it comes up in conversation, change the television channel when some Twilight-related madness pops up and generally avoid Twilight and its arguably insane fans (and this is coming from someone who survived The Great Boy Band Blitz of 1998-2003 – I know what an insane fan looks like). But as Stephenie Meyer’s media melodrama progresses, I just continue to get more and more aggravated and, this time, for a damn good reason.

Let’s sum up what I know to be true thus far – and be warned, as this will contain book spoilers:

1. Stephenie Meyer is not a great writer. I personally believe this to be true and Stephen King agrees, so if you don’t believe me, take his word for it.

2. Edward Cullen represents a male archetype that at best seems overly controlling and at worst seems downright abusive. Though no ‘abuse’ takes place – he doesn’t knock Bella around, basically – in the novels, and it’s a thin line to walk to state this, and I’ve gotten a lot of static from rabid Edward fans for saying so, it’s the manner in which he treats the supposed love of his un-life that shows shades of an abusive relationship. Think about it. He cuts the brakes on her truck to keep her from leaving home, creepily stalks her in her sleep, and exhibits brutal jealousy about her on a near constant basis . Even the Safe Haven foundation sees shades of behavior that can be abusive in the novels, so why are we marketing this to young, impressionable girls as a fairy-tale idyllic romance?

3. Bella Swann begins her journey through the Twilight novels as a supposedly responsible, capable teenage girl who dealt maturely with flighty mother and had plans for college and a future, and ends up married, pregnant and a societal outcast by the age of 18. What is wrong with this picture? Worse still, Bella is glorified as perfection in everything she does, except for a singular flaw of being ‘clumsy’, making it painfully clear that the character is little more than a Mary-Sue.

4. Back to the Edward staring at Bella while she slept: this behavior was portrayed in episodes of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as the newly de-souled Angel/Angelus creeps about the series’ namesake’s bedroom at night and leaves sketches of her sleeping as a means of intimidation. Yet somehow, in Twilight, this is romantic behavior? Stalking is against the law, even in Washington.

5. The series ends with the somewhat protective character, Jacob, resolving to wait for and marry his former-love’s infant daughter. To put it bluntly, he falls in love with a BABY. Why does no one find this ridiculously creepy?

6. While tales of vampires often have the mythology associated with this storied creature of the night reworked to suit the author’s needs, Meyer’s twisting of the vampire concept is so out of sync with anything at all remotely associated with the archetype that they can hardly be called vampires – something rather irritating to fans of classic vampire literature.

7. Throughout Stephenie Meyer’s rise to fame, there has been speculation and an occasional accusation of plagiarism. Many fans of the LJ Smith series The Vampire Diaries drew immediate parallels to the other novels, just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans pointed out not only the same concept of a human-vampire forbidden romance, but also the protective ‘friend’ enamored with the heroine and distrustful of the vampire: Buffy’s Xander to Twilight’s Jacob. Meyer was also sued in late 2009 by Jordan Scott, author of a novel titled The Nocturne, who claimed that portions of Meyer’s Breaking Dawn were lifted from her own work. The suit was eventually dismissed, but plagiarism is the key to the greatest issue at hand with Meyer’s work.

The name of the game, friends, is PLAGIARISM with a big fat P.

Let’s jump forward to Meyer’s most recent release, a novella entitled The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, focusing on a minor character who had appeared in Meyer’s novel, Eclipse. For many fans of the vampire genre in general, the title may seem just slightly familiar. It took me a bit to put my finger on just why it seemed so oddly familiar to me, as I hadn’t read Meyer’s novella (and in all honesty had no intention to do so). Then, it hit me like a ton of bricks – or, in this case, a ton of plagiarized novellas.

The Short, Happy Life of Baby Jenks and the Fang Gang, a vignette featured in Anne Rice’s novel, The Queen of the Damned.

One would hope that Anne Rice needs no introduction, but for the uninformed, to put it succinctly, Anne Rice is the novelist who revitalized and reenergized the vampire genre with her novel series The Vampire Chronicles, beginning with Interview with a Vampire and including The Queen of the Damned.

It’s not just the titles that smack of similarity, sadly – and I am not the only one who thinks so, it seems.

Bree Tanner is a 15/16 year old runaway and victim of abuse who is about to turn to prostitution in order to feed herself who is found by a young gang of vampires and then turned into a vampire herself.

Baby Jenks is a 14 year old pregnant prostitute who is dying after a back-alley abortion and is found by a young gang of vampires and then turned into a vampire herself.

Bree Tanner is eventually killed by a vampiric authority figure, Jane of the Volturi. She was burned to death.

Baby Jenks is eventually killed by a vampiric authority figure, the Queen of the Damned herself, Akasha, the first vampire. She was burned to death.

Is this enough to bring a case of plagiarism? I think so. The character of Baby Jenks has been lifted from Anne Rice’s novel and given a Stephenie Meyer makeover.

The theft of creative thought is a great crime. When will it be punished?

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REVIEW: An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin Monday, Jul 5 2010

Title: An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin
Author: Rohan Kriwaczek
Length: 209 Pages
Publisher: Duckworth Overlook
Publication Date: 2006

Micro-histories are growing in esteem in both scholarly and popular reading circles. With authors like David Starkey and Erik Larson making historic events, eras and figures accessible to a more expansive audience, the genre is growing and new generations are becoming acquainted with an ever widening scope of the past events, both large and small, that shaped the world around them. This surge in popular history is undoubtedly what brought forth from the shadowy past the history of a tradition shrouded in mystery: the art of the funerary violin.

Acting Guild of Funerary Violinists president Rohan Kriwaczek scoured the archives of his mysterious organization to bring to readers a wealth of information related to the origins, activities and subsequent dismantling of the funerary violin tradition, painting wonderfully vivid portraits of the most vibrant characters to ever grace the guild, from the rakish George Babcotte, the guild founder, to the tragically Byronic Charles Sudbury. A violinist himself, Kriwaczek is able to give voice to a musical tradition not heard by the public ear for near to centuries. And the very best part is that not a single word of what Kriwaczek has written has even a modicum of truth in it: he invented it all himself.

The idea in itself can seem repugnant at first: an entirely fabricated history for purely fictional guild. What could possibly be the point? The very concept might even raise ire for those who read the book from cover to cover, only to realize after it is through that it is a fictional history. But while some falsified writing might be decried as literary fraud – as was the case with James Frey and his A Million Little Pieces debacle – Kriwaczek has instead turned the tables on both popular history and the literary tradition. An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin can be likened to the “Blair Witch” film series, with fiction written to be presented as ‘fact’ only as an element of the story. While never explicitly stated within the book, the idea of its less than factual origins can be found is subtle jabs at modern day history and quietly humorous and altogether unlikely scenarios – such as a member of the guild suffering an untimely death due in large to having tripped over an elderly cat – are
small hints at its being entirely fictional.

The major figures in Kriwaczek’s guild history present as major literary archetypes, and none so obviously as the romantic figure of Charles Sudbury, who is the veritable soul of the Byronic hero. Brooding, artistic, half-mad on drink and drug, Sudbury is an erratic genius of his craft. The heavily gothic mysticism attached to the performance and mythology of the funerary violin adds to its romantic appeal; the idea of young men dressed in pale face pant and black ribbons, cavorting in the graveyard with their violins after dark presents an example to be mimicked and mocked by sullen gothic teenagers for centuries to come. Added to the story is the idea of a forced suppression of this supposedly ‘dark’ art by the henchman of the Vatican, who employ violence and thievery to scrub out the existence of the funerary violin tradition entirely. Subsequent denials of such activity by the Church present no cause for disbelief, and it falls well into place within the narrative.

The only real problem of the book comes from the music itself. All feigned positions in fictional guilds aside, Rohan Kriwaczek is a musician, and he writes as a musician. Technical language regarding musical composition can be lost on the unlearned reader, and large portions of the text consist of such technical writing. The treasure trove of ‘lost’ guild music – more likely than not compositions by Kriwaczek himself – would be a welcome treat to a musician, but, again, to those who are spectators rather than performers in the realm of music, they are all but useless.

Overall, this is a very clever effort that, sadly, leaves publishers and booksellers alike unsure of just where to catalog it. It is not straight fiction, nor is it really history. The only that can be said for certain is that it is a fascinating read; we can only hope that Kriwaczek shall treat us with some future rediscovered history of his captivating Guild.

CHECK PLUS: Clever, amusing and a unique concept
CHECK MINUS: Odd and unable to categorize
RATING: A-

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REVIEW: Crimson Wednesday, Jun 30 2010

Title: Crimson
Author: Gord Rollo
Length: 326 Pages
Publisher: Leisure Books
Publication Date: March 2009

The masters of the horror novel have such far-reaching influence that it becomes difficult at times to accept new writers into the fold, as readers are all too quick to point out recycled plot points and character archetypes. While this is a danger in truly any genre, it becomes an even greater problem in horror, where the influence of the greats and their prolific works spread far to all forms of media. So when established anthology writer Gord Rollo introduced his first full-length novel, Crimson, first published in 2002 and then re-released on a wider scale in 2009, the comparisons to previous works by other authors was immediately apparent.

Crimson spins the dark coming-of-age drama of four young boys in a quiet, rural town with a dark past, who mistakenly release a great evil, spending the rest of their short lives confronting the repercussions of what they had done. The obvious influence from horror master Stephen King cannot go unnoticed, or even unmentioned; comparisons to the short tale The Body and the acclaimed novel IT are immediate and unavoidable. However, where King’s masterful storytelling fully confronts the horrors of childhood friends entrenched in the drama of an inescapable evil, Crimson author Rollo merely stumbles and creates a cartoonish take on the same story. Worse still are the notations on the very book jacket, comparing Rollo’s work to King’s; any hope of disassociating one from the other is lost when the publisher chooses a blurb that decries Rollo’s debut novel as the superior to King’s classic. As the novel follows with blatant references to both IT and the short tale The Body that are far too similar for a mere homage, it becomes difficult to accept Rollo’s novel at face value, as the reader instead finds passage upon passage to compare to King’s works.

Rollo’s story centers on young Johnny Page, a classic new-kid-in-town who moves into the local spook house, an abandoned farm that had been the site of several grisly murders some years before. The boy’s family itself is something of a cliche: the absent father, the overweight and overbearing mother, the meager upbringing. This is Eddie Kasprak and Ben Hanscom reborn, shifted from late 1950′s Maine to late 1970′s Ontario and given a new name. Mother Page herself is a walking stereotype, the barest shell of an actual character as Rollo resorts to describing the woman by focusing on her weight, having her think about bettering her lifestyle but decide to eat donuts instead and, worst of all, fall into a pitiful slapstick routine where her girth causes her to fall and break a coffee table. There is no substance here, making it difficult to take the novel seriously when what should be, at the least, a fairly important supporting character is nothing more than gross caricature.

As the story progresses, the willingness to suspend disbelief that is so important to the horror genre may begin to wane as serious questions about the story begin to arise. First and foremost, could a woman and her young son truly move into a small town’s infamous murder house and somehow not hear of the evil that had happened there in ages past? The level of depravity that the author rolls out in the novel’s prologue is deep and disturbing, encompassing axe-murder, suicide, missing bodies, cannibalism and, perhaps worst of all, the horrific death of a helpless toddler. Such vicious acts would be burned into a small town’s psyche; is it really plausible that no one would have told the Page family? The addition of the three local boys, David, Peter, and Tom, make it all the more unbelievable. Young men of that age are notorious for their obnoxious behavior, and it is terribly difficult to believe that not one of the three would have taken ghoulish joy in spilling the beans about the Page home’s history to the new kid on the block.

Bound together with the horror of their frightening discovery, the boys become haunted by manifestations of their own deep-seated fears and as the years pass, the terror they had endured once again comes to be visited upon the little town itself. Rollo’s villain, a demonic pastiche of a dozen or so horror archetypes, attempts the sort of sarcastic bold-faced witticisms that are the calling card of Freddy Krueger, antihero of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, as he wreaks his particular brand of havoc on the four boys. Again, Rollo falls to poor imitation rather than any real innovation.

The great shame in all of this is that Rollo more than proves his worth and talent as a horror writer in the fast-paced, horrifying prologue that could have – and really should have – established Crimson as a stellar debut novel, had the great originality shown in those far too brief pages extended further into the novel. Gord Rollo is most definitely an author to watch, if only to hope that he is able to find his own voice and deliver the stunning horror novel that the world is waiting for.

CHECK PLUS: Great prologue
CHECK MINUS: Unoriginal, Poor Imitation
OVERALL RATING: C-

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Review: Death Without Tenure Wednesday, Jun 23 2010

Grr. Argh. And other noises of pissery.

I had this grand plan for reading a nice catalog of books in 2010 and hitting up not only my beloved popular fiction and literature genres, but also delving into the much maligned field of nonfiction. But, as Robert Burns would easily tell you, the best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men… well, I’m sure you know the rest. With that in mind, I’ve made the decision to re-purpose this blog as a place to talk about the books that I have managed to read, beginning with one that was actually on my 2010 reading list…

Title: Death Without Tenure
Author: Joanne Dobson
Length: 240 pages
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Publication Date: January 1, 2010

This novel is the seventh in a mystery series focused on an English professor turned amateur sleuth, written by Joanne Dobson, herself a noted English professor and literary scholar. The series began with Quieter Than Sleep, Dr. Dobson’s debut novel featuring her heroine, Professor Karen Pelletier, a woman from the wrong side of the tracks who had fought hard to work her way to a position in a prestigious private university. Karen is a likable, down-to-earth, motherly figure that the reader can easily get behind in this first-person “cozy” (meaning a mystery novel featuring an amateur detective that shies away from graphic violence).

I had found the Karen Pelletier series quite by accident, picking up the first in the series at a used book sale because it promised to be ‘a mystery of Emily Dickinson’; I quickly fell in love with the series, its heroine, the grumpy policeman love interest, the charming characters and even the sometimes stuffy fictional Enfield College. Each ensuing novel seemed only to get better, though the sixth definitely left something to be desired – but I’ll get to that in another post.

Dobson returned to form with her seventh in the series. Our beloved Prof. Pelletier is up for tenure at Enfield College while being left to face the stress of the matter alone, with her daughter backpacking through Asia and her love interest, the oddly charming grump Lietenant Piotrowski, away serving with the National Guard in the Middle East. This sets the tone for what is missing from this novel to a grand degree – the likable friends, students and colleagues that had filled the series with their happy presence from the first in the series are scant, a big change from the usual format of the novel.

Also missing, to my great disappointment, is the academic aspect that had speckled the Karen Pelletier novels from the very beginning. From Emily Dickinson to Edgar Allan Poe, to a fictional roman à clef that mirrored the real-life Peyton Place, Dr. Dobson’s novels have always had an accompanying literary mystery that went hand-in-hand with the modern murder the crafty English professor heroine was trying to solve. Not so with the latest entry in the series, which focuses solely on the murder at hand.

That being said, Dr. Dobson’s mystery is still a step above many others in the “cozy” genre, touching on class, gender and religious divisions among her students, the Enfield staff and even her own family while spinning a tale of secrecy and murder. While I’d love to see more of Karen’s “old friends” in the next in the series, even if Dr. Dobson continues on course with her current style, it will be worth the read.

CHECK PLUS: Return to format
CHECK MINUS: Lack of favorite characters; no literary mystery
OVERALL RATING: B

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Putting Together a Reading List – Not as Easy as it Seems! Tuesday, Dec 29 2009

Crunch time approaches and thanks much to the suggestions garnered here, I’ve managed to pump up my reading list just a little bit. Among the fabulous suggestions were some books I’ve already read, including Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’, a gritty modern take on mythology, suggested by my good friend Kate, and the autobiographical ‘Running with Scissors’ by Augustine Burroughs, suggested by Jessica. Both were books that I thoroughly enjoyed, for very different reasons – I’ll go more into that in other posts, but right now, I want to focus on getting my reading lists squared away.

The list as it stands right now is as follows:

CLASSICS
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
*Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

POPULAR FICTION
The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde
Death Without Tenure, by Joanne Dobson (not available until 1/1/10)
Bite Me, by Christopher Moore (not available until 4/1/10)
Pygmy, by Chuck Palahniuk

NON-FICTION
Gothic Charm School, by Jillian Venters
Fat History, by Peter M. Stearns
Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson
Under the Banner of Heaven , by Jon Krakauer
The Executioner Always Chops Twice: Ghastly Blunders on the Scaffold, by G. Abbott
Fever: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Transformed Gender in America, by Tim Riley
Naked, by David Sedaris
Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, by David J. Skal
To Sleep with the Angels: The Story of a Fire, by David Cowan
The Ruby Slippers of Oz, by Rhys Thomas
Party Monster, by James St. James
Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, by David Weeks and Jamie James

Some intended additions are giving me issues, as I don’t know where to classify them. For example: ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’, by Betty Smith. Is this Popular Fiction, or a Classic? While greater than fifty years in age, it doesn’t necessarily fall into that Classic literature category that has for the most part been dominated by the DWM (Dead White Men) of the past. It’s on reading lists for many an English course in schools, but is that enough to color it a classic?

Speaking of classics – the starred Classics on my list I have, sadly, never read. What we are exposed to in high school seems to be a good deal of what we will ever read out of these categories. In days when I’d turn up my nose to something deemed remarkable for a century or two, I’d never have voluntarily picked up a so-called classic. Luckily, time (and university) have made we wise enough to recognize that there is much to be garnered from stories from our collective past.

Now that I have at least a quarter of my intended reading list down, it’s time to talk scheduling! What would be an appropriate order?
Should I make it seasonal, and schedule ‘Dracula’ to fall around Halloween, along with the Krakauer true crime? Or should I save the Krakauer book to be read alongside the new Joanne Dobson mystery that, admittedly, I’ve been awaiting for several years? The only definite time restriction is the new Christopher Moore which, sadly, will not be available until the first of April.

Perhaps it should be ordered more along lines of readability. ‘Wuthering Heights’ is an old favorite, and the Fforde novel is sure to be an easy read; would it be better to select the most difficult of the non-fiction for that particular month?

While this may seem as though I’m overanalyzing, this structured approach to a reading schedule is something I’ve never attempted before; my concern is I’ll wear myself out, or get bored easily when confined to such a strict itinerary. I’ve considered adding the caveat that once my three chosen books of the month are through, I can pick up a short guilty-pleasure read to occupy the rest of that time.

Next year, I’ll have to figure out a way to add in some drama and poetry!

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The Adventure Begins Tuesday, Dec 22 2009

Once upon a time, when I was a slightly less personable soul, I devoured books. I would read upwards of 70 new titles a year, along with a few old favorites tossed in for good measure. I had books at my cubicle desk, I had books in my bag, in my purse, on my nightstand, even in the glovebox in the car. Then, things changed.

Work got a little crazier. The office got a little smaller. Suddenly, I was having working-lunches, with no time to read my precious books. On top of this, the heavy workload was wearing me out; I’d come home too exhausted to think, let alone pick up a book, and that was on nights when I wasn’t bringing work home with me! The sharp drop-off in my reading became depressing; I was reading less than half of what I used to, and with each passing month, it trickled down even lower.

With the dawning of a new year and a new decade, I’ve decided to make a concentrated effort to dive back into the books that I love and bring my reading up to par. My new goal is simple: read one Classic, one new Popular Fiction, and one Non-Fiction book per month for each month of 2010 and write about the experience and the volumes that I read. Which is why I come to you, kindly readers, for your recommendations and suggestions!

The rules are simple. Popular Fiction must be new-to-me novels I have not yet read. The Classics I choose can be re-reads, due not only to my enjoyment of a few old favorites but also to my university background in Literature, which had me reading a lot of these on an analytical and academic level. Non-Fiction should also be books I’ve not yet read – quite a leap for me, as I’ve never been hugely into reading Non-Fiction.

So far on my list for the new year, I have:

CLASSICS:
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

POPULAR FICTION:
The Fourth Bear, by Jasper Fforde
Bite Me, by Christopher Moore (not available until 4/1/09)

NON-FICTION:
Fat History, by Peter M. Stearns
Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson

As you can see, I need to work out this list. Help?

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