palace of winds

This year, I made a New Years goal (not Resolution!) to read at least 24 books: two a month. And so far I am (yay) on track!

A few weeks ago I finished listening to the audiobook of Harlan Coben’s The Innocent, read by Scott Brick. Not really my usual type of book, and — well. When you’re listening to audiobooks, the person reading makes a huge difference. Huge. If you don’t really mesh with the person doing the reading, it’s hard to separate how much you dislike how they’re reading the book from how much you dislike what they’re reading. Brick was just So Overdramatic! about everything, and I found myself not really buying any of it, particularly the dialogue. Maybe the fault of Brick, maybe the fault of Coben. My favorite thing about this book was the complete and utter ridiculousness of the technology. Cell phones must’ve just been — wait. Okay, so I went to look up when this was written, and 2005? Really? Because Coben makes this HUGE deal about the main character and his wife buying camera phones — these cell phones that can send pictures! — but neither of them can really figure out how to use them, or be bothered to try, because they are So. Hard. for realz. And when the main character receives a picture on it, there are maybe eighty-five pages of description about which buttons he pushes to bring up the picture. And there is a private investigator who has super-special software (I KID YOU NOT) to get the picture off his phone and sharpen it. Ditto the video. Which, fine, okay. Let me spend five pages explaining pixels.

Oh man, okay, I have a new favorite part of the book, which is this review from Amazon:

You are Harlan Coben and you are a writer. You are tired of your series character and you have a contract to deliver a book. You decide to write a stand alone book about a guy who can’t become a lawyer because he killed some guy at a fraternity party. So your character becomes a paralegal whose practice is only eclipsed by Danny Devito playing Deck Shifflet, the “paralawyer” in The Rainmaker.

You aren’t a lawyer so you don’t know how utterly improbable this is. Your character marries a wonderful girl, who has a past worse than your protagonist. You offer lots of plot twists, but with fifty pages to go and the bad guys dead, you don’t use them up. So you spend fifty pages showing off how clever you are.

You are so clever that you try to write the book in second person, present tense. Your editor stops you, but you manage to open and close it in the second person. In the middle you write third person past tense from differing points of view. You consider yourself daring. Others are just annoyed at your waste of talent and waste of their time. They know you can do much better.

I didn’t actually mean to rag on the book so much (except the part where the wife tells her backstory to her hubs and it’s supposed to be dialogue but instead it’s like Coben wrote the scene out and just put quotation marks around it. Dear Coben: People do not talk like that! Not even people like me, with weird vocabularies!), but…there you go.

Book #2! Watership Down, by Richard Adams. Y’all probably read this a long time ago, but it was my first time, and I LOVED it. I’m not entirely comfortable with the state of violence or gender politics among rabbits — but then again, they’re rabbits, and it seems like Adams did his rabbit research. So I guess I was more bothered that it didn’t really bother me. ANYWAY. I don’t really like to say too much about books I think people should read — and if you haven’t read this one, I think you should! I’m not ashamed to admit I cried a little when someone went off to bunny heaven. (Which is not a spoiler because c’mon, you know it’s going to happen at some point in a book all about rabbits.)

I also read three (3!) romance novels when I was in St. Louis visiting Steph last week; horrible romance novels are something of a tradition we started in college. We spent one particularly memorable sunny afternoon with them on the rooftop of an Italian hostel, looking down the terraced city of Manarola to the Mediterranean Sea, sipping limoncello. (”Sipping” may not be exactly the right word; we didn’t realize until we went to stand up just what type of alcohol limoncello is. Tip: it is not to be drunk like wine.) They’re books and I read them; do they count? Maybe I’ll keep two running totals…

January 2010 count: 2 (5 including fluff).