A Super-Mega Reading Update!

Since my life is completely and utterly boring and devoid of any drinking and party-making I find plenty of time to read. In fact, all I do now is lay completely submerged under mountains of quilts with the cat beside me and read until my eyes are bloodshot and wonky. I will, occasionally, come up for air and coffee, but that is pretty much it.

Needless to say I've devoured several books in the past few weeks.

I started off March reading John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things. Connolly's novel is about a young boy, David, who endures the death of his mother, OCD-like compulsions, the remarriage of his father, the birth of a new sibling, and a quest in a fairy-tale world filled with rabid wolves, murdering huntresses, and a vile trickster. A wonderful story that fully satiated my fairy-tale obsession.

Next I continued said fairy-tale fetish by reading the fourth volume of Bill Willingham's Fables series, March of the Wooden Soldiers. In this volume, the Adversary is waging an attack on Fabletown, a duplicitous Fable appears, and Snow White is in the last stages of pregnancy. I would have to say that one of my favorite elements of this series is the humor; there is a terrific stab at Young Republicans in this volume that is not to be missed.

At the public library with Hope the other day I actually had ten minutes without the "mom,mom,mom..." mantra to look at books. I grabbed the newest Chuck Palahniuk novel, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. EXCELLENT. I love it when authors gives a story from different characters and hooks it all together. When I first started reading Rant I knew that rabies figured prominently in the plot along with a massive outbreak in rabies related death. Additionally important is "Party Crashing." Party Crashing is a subculture of Nighttimers (those in the future relegated to living lives at night) forming teams and essentially playing tag with their cars on the road. Mid-way through, the book takes a decidedly cyberpunk twist by introducing the concept of "porting" whereby a port is placed in the back of one's head to enable one to have full sensory experiences (as opposed to merely watching t.v. or listening to music). Also, we find out that Buster and party crashing has much more to do with manipulating time and space.

Then it was on to more comic books (my, I read like a boy this month) with the third volume of Mike Carey's Lucifer series, Lucifer: A Dalliance with the Damned. Although this book was very good allowing the reader to see Lucifer's creation of a cosmos, an Eden story, and a closer glimpse into hell, there was less Lucifer in this volume. I know that elements of this volume are important, but I missed having Lucifer witty quips on every page.

Finally, this afternoon I finished Margot Mifflin's book on women and tattooing entitled Bodies of Subversion. This book was a quite read, but lacking in historical detail. The book begins in America in the late 1800s with the emergence of tattooed sideshow ladies and continues with a look at women in tattoo up through the late 1990s. The book is a feminist look at women in tattoos and focuses much of its time on prejudices against women with tattoos and discrimination against female tattoo artists. All that I dig, but that is virtually ALL that the book went into. I wanted a more complete history, stretching back through antiquity. Maori tribe tattoo and Egyptian tattoo were only mentioned briefly. I think this book needed far more research and certainly needed to be longer to constitute a "history" of women and tattoo. At less than 200 pages I think Mifflin barely skimmed the surface of women and tattoos.

I have two books going right now, Angela Carter's Burning your Boats which is a collection of all Carter's short fiction and Charles Bukowski's The People Look Like Flowers at Last to fulfill my poetry thirst. Tomorrow I will most likely pick up another comic book to peruse and start on Sarah Water's novel, Fingersmith.

Oh what I riotously nerdy St. Patty's day I will have.