Reading Part 1

Since my favorite roommate has moved in, and honestly since we've started dating I read don't read as much. This makes me quite sad, but I'm willing to concede those pages as the benefits outweigh the lack. There are other things to do and my reading before bed has turned into his nap time before his night shift, I could still read, but it usually seems so much nicer to just sleep.

But, I have recently finished two books very different and very good. The first The Passage, by Justin Cronin was a huge non-sparkly vampire apocalypse book. (I got it off an amazon list) I loved it because it was huge in scale, it covered the inception of the virus all the way through the fall of North America and the initial stages of rebuilding, but it didn't get bogged down in the details. Cronin did some clever things to get through the messy parts of the story (blah, blah, downfall of the nation blah blah) and focus your attention on the rebuilding and people. Cool story. It's the first of a trilogy and now I have to wait until October for book two.

The other book was Northern Lightt, by Jennifer Donnelly. This book has been sitting on my shelf for a number of years. I think my FB-BFF gave it to me during one of her library purges. It is based on a real murder that took place in 1906 in upstate New York. Apparently, the book An American Tragedy was also based on this murder and though I haven't read that, it is on my shelf and now I'm interested. This was a nice example of a strong voiced female protagonist in teen lit and at the book's end when the heroine starts out on a new journey, I also wanted to know what would happen.

Both of those books got passed along. Nik and I went to the beach for a few days with her delightful daughter and as I have been doing for years I left these books with her. As per usual, she also had one for me, Let's Take the Long Way Home, which she says reminded her of me, but looks sad, so it might have to live on the shelf for a while. My next undertaking is George Martin's, Game of Thrones, so I can eventually watch the series everyone has RAVED about.

This is the strange part about books and reading. Reading is a mostly solitary activity, but books are social. I'm not just talking about book groups, (I belong to only one, and strangely do so reluctantly.) but sharing books, talking about books, giving them, borrowing them and receiving them as gifts are all social activities. Books invite conversation and dialogue. Nik and I have been sharing books since high school. Her mother used to be a major source for my reading material, I remember in college I would raid her book shelf over summer break and I'm sure I borrowed far more than I ever returned. But, reading is so interesting to me that books and conversations about books are important...

(There are a few notable exceptions (my handsome friend, my brother and my Portland Based-BFF) --and this is funny because these are the people I probably spend the most time talking with but none of them read much fiction)

....but with almost everyone else I talk books and share books and suggest and get suggestions. Which is probably why I can't imagine getting a kindle type device. But, that's another post.

A disappointing ending

Okay, what I really wanted to write a post about today was my dear friend's wedding yesterday. Beautiful and perfect, but I just finished the last 30 pages of a book I have been SAVORING and am so annoyed that I'm posting about it. I'll save the good post for tomorrow.

I've been reading "In the Woods" for a few weeks and was totally hooked. I liked the narration, and the twinned stories. It's about a guy who is a murder detective outside of Dublin. When he was 12 years old he was playing in the woods with his two friends and they disappeared and he was found with bloody shoes and no memory of what had happened. Flash forward 20 years and he finds himself working a murder of a young girl in the same woods.

Here's my issue, and I'm sure in some way it just proves I'm an immature reader, or something, but I need resolution at the end of books. I get that life doesn't always have resolution and that there are always things that don't work out, but it bugs the shit out of me when I don't get resolution from a book or movie. Something needs to come together. It doesn't have to come together neatly, but I want more. In some ways I feel the author has totally copped out. That he or she can't figure out how to end it with the same level of intensity or humor or intrigue or whatever as he or she has written the whole book and therefor just quits before the story is actually told.

Of course this is most bothersome when these are books I actually LIKE. For example, Christopher Moore. His endings suck. I loved the book Lamb. Loved it, like laughed out loud on an airplane, loved it. And then the ending just fell flat (literally for those of you who have read the book). That's how I felt about this book....so much build up and then nothing....so annoyed.