What to read...

I’ve been on a bit of a Nick Hornby kick as of late in terms of my reading habits. I just finished Slam, his latest novel. Sure, it’s technically a young adult novel, which makes the fact that it took me weeks to read the darn thing rather depressing, but it still made for a fun read. Also, I can’t complain about any book in which Rufus Wainwright plays a pivotal role. Right now I’m reading The Polysyllabic Spree, which is a collection of his essays where he discusses what books he bought and read every month. So I am reading a book about what books someone else has read. It’s kind of bizarre when you think about it but then again right now I’m hoping that people will read something I wrote about something I read.

What I’d rather touch upon is the fact that I go on these runs where all I do is read one author. If I find an author that I like I will quickly read every book he wrote. Or she wrote as I did spend one summer reading every Sarah Vowell book out there. I’m never sure if that is a good thing or not. I’ve ended up with a lot of books by a rather small number of authors. I’m still well read in the classical sense (especially for someone who never had a class above English 103) but I just get a sense that there are huge gaps in my base.

So, since it looks like I’ll have a great deal of free time on my hands in the coming months I’m looking for book suggestions. Pretty much anything and everything is fair game. I’d prefer fiction just because I’ve spent a lot of time reading non-fiction recently and I want a change. With many of my favorite authors being between books I need some ideas as to where to focus next. Humor is always appreciated, male versions of Bridget Jones are also acceptable as I’m just going to end up writing one of those books anyway but mainly I just want something that is different than what I usually would pick up. Make your suggestions in the comments.

As you can probably guess I’m pretty low on topics tonight. Mainly I’m looking forward to tomorrow as it only occurs once every four years. Well, tomorrow occurs more than once every four years. It happens every day as long as things go according to plan. But Leap Day is fun because it gives us one more day of February to enjoy. This is the best we can do with our calendar, occasionally we have to toss an extra day in there. Still better than in the 1700s when they actually eliminated a week and a half from the books. (True story: calendars were so off that ten days just disappeared.) It’s at times like this I feel like we should have gone to metric calendars. Would have made everything much simpler.

Or we could have just used the Mayan calendar. Sure it ends in 2012 but that’s not too big of a deal. It does make me question why everyone thinks the Mayans were such an advanced civilization. If they couldn’t come up with a calendar that didn’t crash at a certain date you have to wonder about their overall capabilities.

Oh well, enough for this week. Enjoy the weekend everyone.