Anyway, for my Mother's seminar I had to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I realize it's one of the great works of American literature and has won buckets of accolades, but I really really didn't like it. I'm growing to realize that, if I'm going to read something about a thing that might actually have happened, I'd rather read about something that actually DID happen. If I'm going to read something that didn't happen, I want spaceships, or zombies, or zombie spaceships. I realize that Ms. McCullers based this novel on her life, but if I'm going to read about being depressed in the Great Depression, I'd rather it be non-fiction.
As a lark, I read the new Dexter book, this one entitled Dexter by Design by Jeff Lindsay. I realize this is blasphemous, but I really prefer the TV show. I think, too, that this is the first Dexter book I've actually read, having gotten the others on CD to keep me company while sewing. They're not... very... good, but they all tend to be entertaining enough. In this one, Dexter hunts down an artistic serial killer.
The boyfriend threw The Best Horror of the Year at me a little while ago. He'd marked the stories he thought were really worthwhile, per my request, and then got very flustered when I insisted on reading the whole thing (I really just wanted to be aware, while reading, which stories HE thought were best). It was, as all collections of short stories tend to be, made up of a few brilliant stories, a few horrible stories, and a whole lot of mediocre stories. Some of the stories he liked, I didn't, and some he didn't I did.
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is one of those I steadfastly refused to read for ages. I finally read Committed by the same author (the topic was relevant) and found that I really liked HER. I like Ms. Gilbert's voice. I like her attitude. She is the sort of person I'd want to have over for dinner. Eat Pray Love is her memoir about the time she spent recovering from a horrible divorce. I enjoyed it immensely, mainly because she doesn't fall into the trap so many memoirists do (is that a word?). She does not spiral into bitterness, but is always pleasant, considered and measured, even when speaking of her ex-husband.
And then, just to make my collection even more eclectic, I read, completely at random, a book called Total Oblivion: More or less by Alan DeNiro. It's like a weird mashup of McCarthy's The Road and Pratchett's Discworld novels. It's completely random and weird and surreal, but also dark and not very funny at all. It's about a modern family's journey south from their home after their suburb is invaded, first by barbarians, then by Imperial Legions. Technology stops working. There's a weird plague. It's very very strange and I loved it.
(29/105ish)
