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.

I was stalling for so long with moving my old book site over here that I have read approximately a bazillion books since my last update.

The ones I can remember:

Watchmen, by Alan Moore. I am almost certain I read this back in the early 90s. I knew who the characters were. But when I (re?)read it, I didn’t remember a single bit of the plot. I liked it better than I thought I did. And…I guess that’s all I have to say about it. I had smart ideas when I read it months ago–I swear I did!

Dead Beat, by Jim Butcher. Somehow, whenever there hasn’t been a new “Harry Dresden, Wizard” urban fantasy book in a while, I think I don’t really like them much. But then another one comes out and I get hold of it and ignore every man and cat in my life until I’ve gotten through it. So I guess I like these books. They are a lot like the Rachel Caine books I’ve written about before—nonstop action and lots of shit blowing up.

About a Boy, by Nick Hornby. On my quest to read all the Hornby books, I got this one and I really liked it. I’ve seen the movie a few times, so I couldn’t help comparing. Actually, I think I have seen all the Hornby movies, so whenever I read his books I guess I’m doomed to compare. He’s so good at making me like stupid, selfish, spoiled, bratty men. It’s like magic.

The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie and the Orient Express, by Andrew Eames. I read this for my book club, and I didn’t like it much. I almost never like travelogues, but I thought this one might be cool with the Agatha Christie theme (though I don’t really like her books, either). Somehow, even though Eames went through intriguing places like Iraq and Serbia, the book was just kind of limp.

Annnddd then I succumbed to more of my anxiety- and depression-fueled re-reading, wherein I reach for whatever is entertaining and, above all, comfortable. So I re-read the entire Benjamin January series by Barbara Hambly (they sort of fall off in entertainment value in the most recent few books) and all of the Vimes books by Terry Pratchett (they just get better and better).

I also listened to Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (shut up—that was clearly comfort listening, man). And I heard abridged versions of David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable and Fraud (funny; the recordings are probably better than the print versions, because his voice is very important for the stories).

Probably there is more, but I can’t remember.

I’m contemplating a redesign of this site, and maybe moving it over to be part of my other site, so I keep avoiding coming here to post. Which is dumb, because now I can’t remember the books I’ve read in the past month and a half, and I can’t remember how much I liked or hated them and the details of that like or hate. I’ll give it a shot:

Barbara Hambly, Sisters of the Raven and Circle of the Moon. I read the raven book a year or two ago, and, though I generally like Hambly, I didn’t like that book much. It seemed forgettable, and in fact I forgot almost everything about it. Then I got the moon book for Christmas, so I decided to reread the raven book to remind myself of the characters and plot, and this time I really loved it. The characters were full and interesting, and the plot was not predictable or overly chick-ish. By which I mean that a book that purports to be about the magical powers of a group of women is almost certainly going to annoy me with a bunch of “power of womyn, power of the vulva” sort of crap. But this one did not annoy me, not at all. And the second one, the moon book, is also pretty good. The way it ends sort of demands that there will be a third book, and Hambly has written lots of fantasy trilogies, so I’m hoping there will be at least one more. I’ve hunted down most of her old, out-of-print books, and I’ve enjoyed them all, but there’s a clear improvement in her writing and character development. She keeps getting better, and more importantly, she keeps writing stuff that I like. So hurry it up, Barbara; I need that next Yellow City book, please.

Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms. I always pick up books from this Holmes/Russell series thinking they’ll be fluff, and I guess they sort of are, but they are good fluff. I always enjoy them far more than I expect to.

Suzan-Lori Parks, Getting Mother’s Body. I read this (actually, listened to it) for my book club, and I didn’t much like it. I wanted to like the characters, and I did like them sometimes. But mostly they seemed like collections of quirks masquerading as characters, and a lot of the time, Parks herself seemed to feel a bit superior to them. A month ago I could have given a lot of examples of things about the book that pissed me off, and I had a nice rant in my head about how if you’re going to rip off the structure of a Faulkner book, you’d better do it justice, but whatever. I don’t care. This could have been–should have been–a good book, but it’s really not.

Sue Grafton, S Is for Silence. See Laurie R. King, above. I always expect to hate this fluff, but it’s not bad fluff. I am not crazy about the reader for these audiobooks, though. She pauses in weird places in the middle of sentences, and those pauses make the sentences seem like they are trying to be weightier than they really are. I have to struggle not to blame that on Grafton and give up on the book.

David Liss, The Coffee Trader. I don’t know how Liss keeps managing to write incredibly detailed books set hundreds of years ago and somehow keep me from getting bored, but he does. He makes it so you can smell the unwashed inhabitants and the reeking waterways of cities in old Europe, and, in this book, he actually made me want to drink coffee, which I hate. So . . . well done! The stories are good, too, and the characters are so absolutely human that I sort of hate them, which in this case is perfectly all right.

I also just reread the most recent three Harry Potter books because I felt like it.

I’m not doing so great at writing about books as I read them. Part of the problem is that I’m still rereading a lot of stuff instead of reading anything new. Since the last time I wrote, I’m pretty sure I’ve read at least four more Tanya Huff books that I’d read before.

And when I do read something I haven’t read before, I’m still not really going for anything challenging; plus, my reading is sort of guided by whatever is on the New shelf at the library.

Because of the New shelf, I just read Laurie R. King’s The Game and Steven Saylor’s A Gladiator Only Dies Once. I enjoyed the King book, even though I didn’t think I would for some reason. I’ve enjoyed the other books in that series, which follows a post-Doyle Sherlock Holmes and his wife as they have adventures and solve mysteries. This book was engaging. The Saylor book was eh. I really like the novels that star Gordianus the Finder, but I haven’t liked the short stories much. They don’t have any punch at all.

I also checked out a bunch of short story collections and books about writing. So far I’m about halfway through Michael Chabon’s Werewolves in Their Youth, which is really good but is not blowing me away as I expected. (My expectations were mostly formed by the number of good readers and writers I know who think Chabon is brilliant.) I also read about half of Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, but I think it is aimed at really beginning writers, and I was bored.

I just finished listening to Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m not sure that it actually said anything new in a meaningful way, but I liked all the examples he used to support his points. I particularly liked the police-related examples and his deconstruction of the Amadu Diallo shooting. Gladwell somehow explains how people can do such horrifying things without excusing them from blame. Blink is totally pop-science-sociology, and it makes general statements that are almost impossible to dispute; that makes me suspicious of being too effusive about it. But outside of its total lack of a political stance of any kind, it was a damn fun listen.

Finally, I read a graphic novel, Paul Hornschemeier’s Mother, Come Home. I do not know how to read graphic novels, and I don’t know if I even like them. I am really focused on words, so I tend to skip over panels without words in them, and then after several pages of this I realize I don’t know what the hell is going on, so I have to go back and look at all the pictures.

I thought Mother, Come Home was a good story–really heartbreaking–and once I did look at the pictures, I could see the emotion and subtlety they added. I looked up some reviews of it to see if people who do understand graphic novels liked it. Most reviewers seem to think it’s pretty good (and they call it formalist, which I get in terms of modern lit but not in terms of graphic novels), though most of the customer reviews on Amazon accused Hornschemeier of copying Chris Ware too closely.

Since I haven’t read Chris Ware and in fact haven’t read any graphic novels outside of the Sandman books and Watchmen, I’ll just judge this one in a vacuum. It’s good. All of it–the drawing, the words, the mixture of fantasy and reality, the way the whole book is the Introduction, everything. Good.

I may be reading more graphic novels, mostly because Chris has decided to write one, so he’s reading a lot of them and then trying to make me read them.

I haven’t updated here in a long time not because I haven’t been reading but because I’ve just been rereading a lot of books. Comfort reading. There has been too much going on, and I just can’t concentrate on anything new. I have checked out The Brothers K from the library twice and never got around to reading it because everyone tells me it’s so brilliant and heartbreaking, and I just don’t feel like being heartbroken at this time.

So in the past few months I’ve read, oh, probably at least 20 books that I read before–some Tanya Huff, some Terry Pratchett, Barbara Hambly, Rachel Caine, etc. I read some new stuff, too, but it was mostly by the same people.

Two new Rachel Caine books–Windfall, which is the next in the Weather Wardens series, and Devil’s Bargain, which is the beginning of a new series. I have written about Rachel Caine here before, and what I said there still stands. Incredibly fun reading.

I also listened to audiobooks of the new Lemony Snicket (The Penultimate Peril) and the new Terry Pratchett (Thud!).

I enjoyed the Lemony Snicket far more than I thought I would. I was getting bored with the repetitive plots and the delayed delayed delayed denouement. And now look! Denouement! It was a good book. Darker in a darker way, if that makes any sense. Until now, the darkness of the whole series has been really cartoonish to me. It’s still kind of cartoonish, but more scary, too.

And of course I loved the new Pratchett book. It’s got my favorite character–Sam Vimes. I believe that Vimes is the best Pratchett character, and the books with him as a main character are the best books. It doesn’t hurt that I like all the supporting characters in the Vimes books an awful lot, too. Whenever Pratchett fans say that they like the Rincewind books, I try not to smirk. Those are slapstick. The Vimes books are really rich and way deeper than the silly comedy (which is funny, just not brilliant) of Rincewind and his Luggage and Cohen the Barbarian.

I admit that after I listened to Thud! on audio, I happened across it on the library new arrival shelves, and so I checked it out and read it, too.

And finally, I just finished listening to the new Neil Gaiman book, Anansi Boys. Outside of Good Omens and the Sandman series, Gaiman books don’t tend to stick with me. I can’t really remember anything about American Gods, and I know I read a book by him once that had people in a subway, but I can’t remember what it was called. I enjoy his books while I’m reading them, and based on interviews and articles, I think I’d like to hang out with him, but I just don’t retain the stories very well. On the other hand, I don’t retain much of anything; I think my memory is going. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Anansi Boys.

I think my enjoyment was about half the story and half the reader, Lenny Henry. That was the absolute best reading of an audiobook I have ever heard. And I just finished listening to Tim Curry read Lemony Snicket, and Stephen Briggs do his usual awesome job with Thud!! Still, Lenny Henry did such a spectacularly perfect job with Anansi Boys that I have said, and I say again, I would listen to him read a credit card disclosure statement. I love him.