Reading Update
It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to look at my bookshelves and see what is new, what is on the cusp of being read, and what needs to be reviewed. I am sure, to be honest, that there are a lot of things that need to be reviewed and probably won’t be, for some time if ever, as my life has taken several interesting and weird turns and as I can see, for the foreseeable future, I won’t have the time necessary to review books or anything else. On occasion I may come across something that I find noteworthy, but for the most part, I will remain a hostage to schedules that include school and work and work.
With that said, I acquired a stack of old pulp mystery and science fiction novels a few weeks ago. Well, Rebecca purchased them for me for like two bucks at a Friends of the Library sale in Dolores, CO. On top of that my friend Denton gave me stacks of books on playwriting, play theory, plays in general, and what appears to be an excellent copy and translation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. A book I tried, and failed, to read a year or so ago, and one that I, on occasion, pick up to read and, again, fail to get into. I don’t know if it’s the book or the translation – at present I am blaming the translation; which really reinforces the need to acquire copies of The Modern Library translations of books and titles that I like to read. There are many reasons to own Modern Library editions, not the least of which is that they generally have really good translations as well as notes and essays that reinforce the content of the book. I haven’t purchased a modern library edition of anything in quite a while; though when browsing through Barnes and Noble the other day I noticed that Barnes and Noble have their own imprint and are playing on the spine style of Modern Library editions with the one exception being color scheme. Modern Library, in trade paperback, uses a brown and tan color scheme. Barnes and Noble is using a pastel color scheme. No one should use pastels as a color scheme.
I did purchase, finally, a copy of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Not one minute before I’d listened to an abridgement of the book on audio CD at the insistence of my mother and then went and wasted money on one of the worst films I have seen to date. The Da Vinci Code movie was bad with several capital “B”’s followed by several bolded exclamation points. Bad. With that said, I did read a blog where a screenwriter decided to put it head-to-head with National Treasure, a movie I actually enjoyed, and he decided to declare The Da Vinci Code the better movie of the two. You can read that review here. Now that I’ve purchased the book, I probably need to read it, it is sitting under a stack of other books. One from England, some books on Gypsy culture, a few plays I purchased and haven’t gotten to yet… you know, all those important things.
With school out and me off for two months I was hoping that I would get all happy and excited about reading books. And I am. But the truth of the matter is that I am looking at some other things coming down the pipe and, truth told, reading for fun may, for the first time in my life, take a backseat to reading for other purposes. Like, for example, I was supposed to re-read a play that I have callbacks for this evening. I didn’t. Probably won’t spend a lot of time reading it unless they give me the green light on the part I am auditioning for (and that I can afford gas between Provo and Salt Lake several nights a week for several weeks). So, who knows? I am still out there buying books, putting money in the one thing that has defined a lot of my life for a long time, and hoping to REALLY break through a stalemate I have with my word processor at the moment. I can start putting ideas on virtual paper and then I hit a roadblock and stop. There is a lot of stopping.
That’s it for now. Nothing to report. No new good books to suggest; though I will say that Nicholas Sparks, At First Sight was probably one of the worst books I have ever listened to with plot points that didn’t matter, and dead characters that didn’t make sense. Don’t make sense. I’ve read some of his books, they’re not great, they’re written to elicit a specific emotion, but this one was REALLY, really, REALLY bad. It was almost as bad as watching Donnie Darko or The Da Vinci Code or a root canal without anesthesia. My mother liked it, though. So… I guess there is a market out there for smarmy and sappy crappy writing. And, you know, I sit here thinking, “I can do that,” and my fingers tell me, “You can do that,” and still… nothing.