Reading and Referral

Like the obsessive compulsive that I am, I keep records of what I read each year, and I date my reading year from my birthday rather than January 1. Said birthday being today, October 14. (Lana's is October 13, btw.) The 06-07 year was a good one for me. I read 100 books, which is above my usual average. But my total was helped by deciding last year that I was going to read some shorter books and more poetry. The 9 poetry collections I got through didn't take a lot of time. Other than that, nonfiction was my highest category, with 19. Mystery/thriller followed at 18, and then 17 and 14 respectively for fantasy and horror.

The best book I read this year was Gently into the Land of the Meateaters by Jim Sallis, which is a collection of his essays. The worst one was the Werewolf one that I blogged about on September 3 under the title "Altering Point of View," and another weak one was a collection of Japanese Cthulhu Mythos stories that I had to read for a review. The most interesting poetry collection I read was Charles Bukowski's Love is a Dog from Hell.

For the new reading year I've decided to focus on big books, and, accordingly, have started Red Mars, at over 570 pages, by Kim Stanley Robinson. The first 15 pages nearly wrecked it for me. It was essentially an "epilogue" to the story, and I was within a page or two of tossing it before it started to get interesting. Once he went back and started on the beginning of the story on page 26 I quickly found myself hooked and am reading avidly.

As for writing today, I'm going to simply refer you to an excellent piece by Steve Malley entitled "As Above, So Below." Lot of good stuff in this one.