I called this site “A Study of Reading Habits,” but really I don’t write about my reading habits much. I can describe my habits, though. I think I’ll describe them according to why I read them.

Comfort

Mainly, I read in bed, just before I go to sleep. If I read something too troubling or thought-provoking or scary at that time, then either I won’t fall asleep or I’ll fall asleep and have terrible dreams. So before bed, I tend to read genre novels–because I know sort of what to expect. And I especially like to read genre novels (mysteries and fantasy novels, with some science fiction) that are part of a series, because then I really, really know what to expect and can judge whether I should be reading it before bed. And in addition to that, I tend to re-read a lot of my series novels.

In the past few months, for example, I’ve re-read for bajillionth time all the Lindsey Davis/Didius Falco Roman mystery novels. Plus I read the most recent two of those for the first time. That’s 18 novels.

I also re-read four old Barbara Hambly novels (the Dark books, plus A Stranger at the Wedding) and two newer ones (the Raven sisters books). I re-read an old Tanya Huff book (The Fire’s Stone) and the sixth Harry Potter and all the Vimes books by Terry Pratchett.

I’m sure I re-read more than that, but that’s all I can think of right now.

Entertainment

In the past few months, I read some books I hadn’t read before: the new Harry Potter and a young adult novel called Haters. Those were both entertaining. I read Haters because I went to a writing conference and my workshop teacher was the author, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. (She was a hilarious and attentive teacher, and she’s a great writer.)

And I got the new Tanya Huff book in the her space opera series, which rocks (both the series and the new book). I listened to two new Charlaine Harris books in series I’ve been reading (the one about the vampires and the one about the chick who feels dead people).

Then a blog entry within a blog entry got me interested in Nicola Griffith, so I tracked down her first two Aud Torvingen books, The Blue Place and Stay, which are pretty cool noirish kind of books. I like them a lot, though in the second one, Aud is recovering from the death of someone close to her, and I kept being annoyed because that character never felt to me like a fully developed character, so I can’t figure out why Aud is so fucked up over it. But aside from that, these books are good, and I’m planning to get ahold of the third one.

Finally, I read Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, which was so good I can’t even write about it.

Sports/Fitness

I like to read books and magazines about the physical activities I enjoy, so I read a lot of stuff about yoga and running and occasionally some stuff about bicycling. I . . . somehow never end up reading a whole book, though, because I skip over the stuff I already know and troll the index for things I’m interested in.

A few months back, though, I got re-interested in skating, so I read most of Rollergirl (about Austin’s recent roller derby resurgence) and skimmed Inline! (a how-to guide). I read only part of these books not because they’re bad or anything. I got more interested in doing some actual skating, so my non-bedtime reading time was limited. (No nonfiction at bedtime. I don’t know why. This is just a rule.) And then I hurt my stupid hip, so I had to lay off skating altogether, and I certainly didn’t want to read about it.

I skimmed through Chi Running, Body, Mind, and Sport, and Yoga for Depression. I’ve just started Jeff Davis’s book about yoga and writing, called The Journey from the Center to the Page (also because of the writing conference).

Influence of Other People

My brother has gotten interested in chef-ing and recommended some audiobooks about it, so I listened to Kitchen Confidential (I know, a decade after everyone else read it) and I’m now listening to Bill Buford’s Heat. My conclusion so far is that restaurant kitchens are just like I remember them, even though the ones I worked in were all crappy franchises and not at all like the starred restaurants described in those books. And also, chefs are a bunch of nutty motherfuckers.

I guess there are other reasons I read, too, but these have been the ones influencing my reading this year.

Carol O’Connell is probably my favorite mystery writer. I just listened to her most recent three books. I had read two of them a few years ago, but I forgot most of the twists. Her books are always so layered and complicated and twisty. Man, I love them. I can never tell how things are going to turn out, and that is important! It’s not crucial. I read lots of mysteries in which the criminal and the motives are obvious, yet I still enjoy the story.

But O’Connell builds up such complex piles of people and emotions and motives and secret activities—it’s just amazing to watch it all line up at the end.

She has some kind of thing for lost kids, particularly lost kids who have lost a parent, or parents who have lost kids. Still, it never gets boring. It gets melodramatic, but that’s okay. The regular characters, especially Mallory, the main character, are all smart and cool and perfect.

So I say to you, if you have not read O’Connell, start now. Read the Mallory novels. Read them in order. They have different titles for the British and American versions, but lots of lists on Amazon will steer you right. Go, go, go.

I reread at least a few Lindsey Davis/Falco mysteries every year. I love that period in Ancient Rome, and I love that Davis made up a bunch of characters for that period who talk and act like they live in . . . oh, 1950s London, maybe. The books are just a whole lot of fun.

I loaned the first several to a friend and that put me in the mood to read them again. So as soon as I got them back, I started from the first book and I’ve just been reading every one of them. I am on book number fourteen now, I think. I have not yet read book 16, because it’s just coming out in paperback in a few months, at about the same time that book 17(!) is coming out in hardback.

Anyway, my point is that if you like to read at night just before falling asleep, as I do, these are awesome books for a big, long binge. They aren’t too gritty and upsetting; they’re funny; the characters are entertaining. Go for it. I’ve got them all, if you want to borrow them.

This is the latest in a mystery series by Carolyn Haines. I like this series, but I think I can read only one book in it at a time. I can’t go on a big binge and reread them all, because I get kind of tired of the ultra-southernness of the atmosphere.

I mean, I like that Haines sets her novels in the south and doesn’t make fun of us. I like that. I don’t so much love that her characters all live in old plantation houses and actually have names for the houses. Excuse me, homes. That’s the part that gets tedious. The fact that the main character can’t just say, “Come out to my house.” She has to say, “Come out to Dahlia House.”

And . . . I have to say that I can predict the killer and the killer’s motive pretty damn quickly in these books.

BUT the fun in this series is in the characters, not in the plot. Even though I knew who and why very early on in this one, I still enjoyed reading about the characters. And there’s an interesting device that Haines uses—the ghost of a black maid who lived in Dahlia House at the time of the Civil War. The ghost, Jitty, is a permanent reminder of the history of the land, and she has an ongoing schtick dressing up in fashions from various historical times, mirroring whatever mental crisis the main characters, Sarah Booth, happens to be going through.

Also, I love Tinky.

It had been awhile since Laurie King published a Kate Martinelli book. She’s been writing all those Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books. This time, she combined the two series in a way that worked really well, though I was skeptical.

In this one, Kate is still a San Francisco homicide detective. She and her partner have a kid. A guy is murdered—a guy who collected Holmes memorbilia and sold it for really big profits and also affected to look like Holmes sometimes. This guy, Philip Gilbert, had found an old manuscript that didn’t mention Holmes; but the narrator sounded like the Holmes of the few stories Conan Doyle wrote from Holmes’s perspective. Gilbert was working on authenticating the manuscript when he died.

Now, in King’s Russell/Holmes series, they get into all kinds of business that stuffy Victorian Conan Doyle would never have written about. And this manuscript has Holmes dealing with a transvestite and his/her male lover, who has been murdered. That whole manuscript is included in the Kate Martinelli story, and it’s as interesting, if not more interesting, than the surrounding modern mystery.

Anyway, it’s a great mystery novel. I listened to it, and the readers were good, too. There was one reader for the Martinelli parts and one for the Holmes manuscript.