The Dickens

"There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing." — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451



I always have a book with me. From the disappearing library, from the used book store, or borrowed. I read at home, during lunch at work, and defiantly at the doctor’s office. Yes I know that there are magazines that the doctor very generously lays out, but how anyone can read Golf Magazine is beyond my understanding. How much can continue to be written about golf anyway? They might as well publish Get Off The Sofa And Walk Into The Kitchen Magazine. I understand how to play golf; hit the ball with the club, walk a bit and hit it again, then hit it into the hole. You explain to me how to get from the living room to the kitchen once, twice tops, and I’ve got it down. I don’t need a magazine telling my how once a month.

I have a reoccurring appointment for a treatment that takes an average of four hours. Can you imagine being stuck in a chair for four hours with no book and only Golf, or worst yet CEO Magazine to read? Really, there was a copy of CEO magazine on the table in the waiting room of a doctor’s office I visited once. Really, there is a magazine named CEO. How many CEOs are out there, yearning for a magazine that would cater to their special needs? “Oh, did you see the article in CEO Magazine about how to pick which of your 10 garages to park your Mercedes Benz fleet ?”

But I digress, which probably should have been the name of this blog. I was talking about books. I read, mostly fiction, for entertainment. If a little knowledge seeps in, well that’s just a bonus. When choosing a book to read I usually use two criteria; has the author written something else I liked or is the idea interesting? That doesn’t exclude other ways of finding new books like recommendations and a cool looking cover.

When searching by author I may not always choose to read what I find, but I’ll look at books by Stephen King, Denise Lehane, Jasper Fforde (Thanks Ken), Dan Simmons and Philip Kerr, to name a few. I used to have Alistair MacLean, James Michener, Ray Bradbury, and Clive Cussler on this list but one of those guys doesn’t write any more, one has fallen into boilerplate plots, and two up and died. But just because someone has passed on or stopped writing doesn’t mean I’ll not read them anymore. After all, I’ve read Something Wicked This Way Comes about four times.

I'm not proud. I'll tell you straight up who I read. Dickens be damned, I'm going to read a Michael Crichton book.

When someone has an interesting idea, like Mr. Corley’s unusable bombs in my previous post, I can’t wait to see how the author works it out. Some interesting ideas that worked on me in the past; what if we absolutely needed to raise the Titanic (Cussler), what if everyone who had a cell phone suddenly turned into a semi-cannibalistic maniac (King), or what if a good man was forced to take on the identity of a known Nazi criminal in order to get the help he needed to escape from Germany in 1949? (Kerr). So there are many other authors I will read and sometimes the cover of a book gets me in the showroom, but it’s the story that gets me to buy the car.

The last two books I’ve read are Under the Dome by Stephen King and Poland by James Michener. Between the two it’s a total of about 1,500 pages, Stephen King’s book totaling over 1,000. But I like a thick, heavy book now and then. I meal if you will. I like the weight of it, the rough edges of the pages, and the how the corners of the cover get worn from its weight.

Mr. King’s book, although maybe his longest, was not his best. My sister once told me she doesn’t read Stephen King because she was tired of just when you began to care about a character, “snakes would come shooting out of their eyes” or something. I’d be okay with the snakes, but in this book they didn’t make an appearance. But snakes, or the lack of snakes, is not why I was disappointed in this book. I didn’t care too much for it, although I did finish it, because after all was said and done, and a lot was said in 1,00 pages, not much was done. Hopefully I won’t be spoiling this for anyone, at least I know I won’t be for my sister, but the hero of this book really doesn’t do anything.

Poland while long, but not nearly as long, was much more interesting. First off, James Michener doesn’t write short books. I gave up on Hawaii after the 400th page about the asshole missionary. Not that all missionaries are assholes but if you've read the book, you know who I'm talking about. I think I may have stopped reading 3 or 4 books in my life and I’m sure that if James Michener took phone messages for an afternoon, all of those scribbling on Post-It Notes would have been far superior to the other 2 or 3 books I abandoned. So I felt I owed Mr. Michener. So I picked up Poland and I loved it. How the Polish people’s ability to screw in light bulbs ever came into question is a mystery to me.

But while I love books, and with a couple of exceptions the longer the better, I find that many people around me, and I assume many people everywhere, seldom read. When I was at my long medical appointment with the 1,000 page Under the Dome, a block of wood really, a nurse said, “That’s a big book. How long does that take to read?” And when I was at another appointment with Poland, my doctor said pretty much the same thing. Neither asked me what the book was about nor if I was enjoying it. I felt a little sad for them. They see a large book, and probably any book, as a chore; something that has to be slogged through. I doubt either has read a book for the simple enjoyment in years. Maybe that fear of reading is where Scare the Dickens comes from. Well, I guess someone has to keep Golf Magazine in business.

Right now I’m reading Drood by Dan Simmons. It clocks in at just over 700 pages. I was sitting in the little patio area at lunch reading it and two different coworkers passed by, saw the book and said, “How long to read that?” Luckily for me, neither would most likely be reading CEO.