Monday, November 28, 2011

Reading List

I've been reading a LOT these past few months. Some really great books have come my way and I've been meaning to share.

My most recent read, which helped me through a torturous 2 1/2 hour bus ride back from the Federal Police, was "The Dante Club." I'd picked it up at the Anglican Church's book sale (always going on, books are about R$2, lots of trade paperbacks in English, yippee! And children's books are free.)...but didn't really do more than glance at the back cover. It's been sitting on the shelf for a while, forlorn and forgotten, and made it into my bag because I had a feeling Sudoku alone wasn't going to cut it for the long day ahead of me. While historical thrillers aren't usually my preferred genre, I enjoyed this one immensely, with its literary/murder plot: a serial killer is loose in Boston, and his methods are straight out of the pages of Dante's Inferno.

Hands down the most interesting book that's crossed my path has been "The Order of Odd-Fish," a book I can recommend to those with a heightened sense of the beauty of absurdity and an affinity for intentionally purple prose. I've never read anything quite like it, though I suppose if you crossbred Monty Python with Roald Dahl in some of his more fanciful moments, you'd probably come close. I laughed. A lot. I'm keeping it on the shelf next to my invisible copy of Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" for the way it wakes up my mind and shakes up dry wordsmithing.

And then there was Joe Hill's "Horns," a book that crawled under my skin and lodged for a time. It's grotesque, fascinating, horrific, chilling, sweet by turns and gripping. (No surprise here; he's Stephen King's son!) After a bad, maybe even wicked, night, Ignatius wakes up with a bad hangover, horns...and some surprising new talents that allow him to chase down his girlfriend's murderer.

While suitcase space is at a premium, I will be near a library in the next month or so...what books would you recommend I check out before returning to the land of very-little-suitable-reading-material-in-English?

1 comment:

Jennifer said...

I think I'd really like the odd fish book. I'm gonna order it - I need a good laugh right now.