All These Books and Nothing to Read

I've been poking around online looking for a book to read and nothing looks that interesting to me. It could be the cold I'm fighting off or it could be that I just don't know what the heck I want to read next. Picking a new book is a big commitment. First there's the $14 it costs to buy one, then there's the couple of weeks I'll be spending with it, then there's all the doubt about the choice I made. It's hard!

I used to work at Borders where it was much easier to be daring and try out books - they were free after all. On lunch breaks, I could just take any book off the shelves and give it a try. I did this every day and read a store full of books without ever having to pay for a single one. Sweet.

This led to my favorite game of "What's Your Favorite Book?"

I asked the retired French teacher who stocked the Literature section (84 Charing Cross Road), the video game and comic book freak who stocked the Sci-Fi section (anything by Tim Robbins), the awkward Music Clerk (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) the dramatic Cafe Barista (Danielle Steel), everyone got asked.

They would tell me a book and I'd read it. No matter how freaky. Or boring. I figured it was reading after all, so even if it was Danielle Steel, there were worse things I could be doing with my brain cells.

This was the best thing in the world, I'm telling you.

Free books and I never had to choose for myself. This of course led to a frightening variety of tastes in books and led to other games like "Whatever Books Are Left On The Floor" where I'd read whatever someone hadn't thought to reshelve at the end of the day. That game was riskier and led to such delightfully bizarre books as Tex and Molly in the Afterlife.

I eventually left Borders and had to start choosing my own books. Which is so hard. I've resorted to choosing books based on their covers. I have to say it's worked out well for me. Being an illustrator who aspires to have her own artwork on the cover of a zillion books all over the world, I can appreciate a beautiful cover illustration and it makes me want to touch the book, to find out more. The covers are what interested me in these three awesome books by Garth Nix: Sabriel, Liriael and Abhorsen. (I think it was Leo and Diane Dillon who illustrated those covers - I love the Dillons' work. ) So I figure, if a publishing house thinks enough of a book to hire a good illustrator (or in the case of Mr. Nix's books - two phenomenal illustrators) then the book has got to be worth reading.

When there aren't any inspriing book covers to peak my interest, I often pick through my mom's enormous collection of books for something good. My mom works full time and goes to school and somehow manages to read three books at a time and, like a dozen a month. I don't get it. But anyhow, my mom likes to read books about serial killers and crazy people. She's interested in the psychology of it all, which I get, but when my mom tells me that she loves Augusten Burroughs and I should read Running with Scissors... Well, if any of you have read Running with Scissors, think about YOUR MOM telling you she loved it. It's like when my grandmother recommends a book with a big, nasty love scene in it. As I'm reading it, I'm thinking, "Grandma read this (eeew!) and now she knows that I'm reading it!" It's just a little disturbing, that's all.

Then there's the best-ever book club in the world, the BBCS, (I could tell you what is stands for, but then I'd have to kill you), which was started with four of my former co-workers. We have very few rules in the BBCS, (and actually reading the chosen book is not one of them), we're more interested in eating than reading, but having a common book to talk about for a few minutes just gives us a good excuse to meet for lunch more often.

The only rules a loyal BBCS member must follow are these: the chosen book must never be sad; never have anyone in it who dies, (unless it's an anonymous character in a murder-mystery book whose death, although unfortunate, is necessary for the storyline - it's the long, painful, harrowing deaths-by-cancer that we're not interested in reading); never have any dying pets, (that's a new one I added after a conversation about this evil book); and never ever ever are any books written by Alice Hoffman allowed in. We read one Alice Hoffman book early on in the organization of the BBCS and we all developed serious allergies to Ms. Hoffman's writing on account of the thick, heavily descriptive, overly abundant flora in her books. We now have an aversion to all apples, apple trees, flowering trees in general, and anyone named Jorie or Collie.

Other than the Hoffman mishap of '05, the BBCS has been a great resource for different types of books that I'd never choose on my own. I've read two murder mysteries, a collection of short stories, a book about a blogger, and my last selection, A Long Way Down, which I really enjoyed, and which added some fun new British curse words to my vocabulary, but which the rest of the BBCS wasn't to keen on. I told them to bugger off. I liked it and that's all that mattered! Our current book is Without You: A Memior of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent, which I haven't read yet because we developed a policy on hardcover books where if you don't feel like investing in the book, you can wait to borrow it from the person in the BBCS who chose it in the first place. So here I am waiting, and now I need a book to read.

I just finished reading The Secret Life of Bees which I read in three days and which I loved very much, but what do I read now? There was a little teaser in the back of The Secret Life of Bees about The Mermaid Chair which sounds fantastic but I just can't bring myself to read two books by the same author back to back. It just seems like a cop out. If I wanted to read the same author over and over, I could just read Danielle Steel for the rest of my life. I need to separate authors by at least a few books. So now what?

I got the idea in my head that I should take stock of what I've read recently. Maybe that would help me decide on what to read next. So here goes, in no certain order, just as I remember them, the books I've read in the past year. (This is March '05 to March '06 - not books I've read since January - I'm not that good.)

The Secret Life of Bees
The Dog Walker
A Long Way Down
Why Girls Are Weird
Good In Bed
I'm Not the New Me
Everybody Into the Pool
Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn
Dress Your Family in Courdoroy and Denim
Killer Summer
Sammy's Hill
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

And now I'm sad. Is that ALL I've read? In a year? Well, I have been busy. And I do read a lot of blogs, so that has to count for something.

All right, now I'm depressed at my illiteracy and I still don't know what I want to read next. Anybody got any suggestions?