Bookworm

Today is the first day of my winter break…10 days off from work. I feel fortunate to have this time off, as I work in the payroll software industry, and year end is traditionally the busiest time of the year. But I work from home, and if I agree that if something earth shattering happens before Jan 2nd (like Congress gets a plan voted on, and the IRS is then able to put out new withholding tables), I will put in a few hours and get that info to our clients, I can pretty much take the time off. It works well for me.

So, aside from Christmas and New Years and birthday and going to see my Grandma in Stockton, I’m looking forward to spending some time reading. What shall I read, you may ask? Well, thanks for asking, I’ll tell you.

First up, Fray. The Hanukkah armadillo brought us comics this year. Ted got the next installment in The Walking Dead series, Maya got Avatar: The Last Airbender – The Promise (part 1), and I got Fray. If you know me at all, you know I’m a huge fan of the TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A couple of years ago, Dark Horse Comics put out what they called Season 8, which picks up where the series ends. I was hungry for anything Buffy. You know what? It was so so. I think it ends up being a lot of money spent, and the story wasn’t that interesting, and too much weird stuff happened, and then they killed of Giles, so yeah, they’re dead to me. Fray is the same world that Buffy inhabits, the mythology is the same, but it’s several hundred years in the future, and the character Fray is the newest slayer. Awesome. After I finish reading that, I’ll probably go back and revisit some of the Season 8</> comics, because they did a sequence where Buffy went into the future and met Fray, and I had no idea what any of it meant or what they were talking about. I’m almost 1/2 way through with it, and I’m really enjoying it.

Next is the new Barbara Kingsolver book, Flight Behavior. The first Kingsolver book I ever read was Animal Lessons, a book my sister liked enough that she gave it to me twice (obviously forgetting that she had already given it to me.) Getting a book twice makes one think, hmmmm, this must be good, so I finally got around to reading it, and I loved it. Then I went on and read The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, which I loved so much, I wrote her a fan letter. Back before the internet was big, and you would write a letter on paper and put it in the mail. She wrote back, which was great. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t enjoyed any of her more recent works quite as much as those first ones. She is passionate about environmentalism, and while I agree that this is indeed important, I often feel like she’s trying to convince me with her novels, like I’m being preached to. Not a big fan of that. So we’ll see. I hope that I love this one. In it, she returns to her Appalachian roots, which I find pretty interesting, so I have high hopes. I got this book from the library, and as there was a long waiting list for it, I have to read it sooner rather than later, as I cannot renew it.

Then I’m diving into a genre that doesn’t generally hold a lot of fascination for me, historical fiction. I’ve heard really good things about Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, so I thought I’d give that a try. I guess the movie left me wanting to know more about his life, but not so much that I’m willing to go all of the way into a non-fiction book. We’ll see if I get there next. Not much of a non-fiction fan, personally.

Lastly, we come to So Long, See You Tomorrow. I kind of think my FB friend Lisa, with whom I went to High School, might have recommended this one, but then again, it may have been someone else.  She recommended another book to me awhile ago, Finding Nouf, that I liked so much, I’ve given it a couple of times now as a gift.  I don’t know much about it, other than whatever whomever wrote about it stuck, and made me want to read it enough that I put it on hold at the library. It looks to be a quick little read, so perhaps I’ll dive into that one between Flight Behavior and Lincoln.