Category Archive for ‘Books’ at AudioShocker

Lately it’s been hard for me to find books that I love. I’ve read plenty that are pretty good, that I might recommend if someone asked me for a reading suggestion, but there hasn’t been anything recently that has made me want to go around telling people, “You HAVE to read this.” This past weekend, I think I found the book that has broken that dry spell: The Host by Stephanie Meyer.

Meyer found fame five years ago, with the first installment of her vampire saga, Twilight. I remember hearing about her books, which were becoming immensely popular, several years ago, but I never picked one up, since they were targeted to a teen audience. Then last summer she published Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight series, and it knocked Harry Potter out of the number one best-seller spot.

This week, Entertainment Weekly’s cover featured the actors who will star in the movie adaptation of the Twilight series, and I decided to read the article. There were a few sentences about The Host, saying it was her first adult novel and is a blend of science fiction and romance. Oh, yeah, it also sold for $600,000 at auction and debuted at No. 1. Which means that Meyer is a rockstar in the literary world.

I haven’t read science fiction in a very long time, not since I fell in love with The Giver and A Wrinkle in Time when I was young, and I am happy that Meyer renewed my interest. The Host is interesting, thoughtful, and wildly imaginative. Unlike a lot of what I read, where my facination with the characters generates my interest in the novel’s plot, the plot of this novel is making me interested in the characters. Which is so refreshing. Reading something where the plot is so crazily inventive is a great change of pace from character study (though that is defintely not to say that Meyer doesn’t have an equally insightful take on what, literally, makes up the human soul. In this book, alien “souls” take possession of human, plant, and animal “host” bodies. The “soul” that is the focus of the book can’t subdue the mind of the human body it has possessed).

I’m only about 100 pages in, and I’m happy there are 500 more to go. If Meyer can create a dynamic, crisp, intricate world in the first sliver of her book, I can’t wait to see where she goes from here.

Now that I ride the bus to work, it has become necessary for me to read two books at one time. I need “public” reading for the bus and “private” reading for at home. I doubt that anyone actually notices what I’m reading on the bus, but I know that 90% of the time, if I’m sitting next to someone who’s reading, I semi-blatantly check out their book. And sometimes there’s something so strange I look at them for a while and think, “I wonder what they do when they’re alone, since they’ll actuallly read that in front of people on the bus.” So yes, sometimes I literally and metaphorically judge a book by its cover.

So, what’s my #1 choice for “public” reading? Jodi Picoult, hands-down. Interesting, timely, page-turners with discreet titles and covers. She must write at least one book a year, and she’s been writing for a while, so she keeps me in non-embarrassing material for the 500. You can see how PC she is by looking on her web site. A cute pic of her, in front of a field of tulips is the first thing you see. Some titles of her books: “My Sister’s Keeper”, “The Pact”, “Mercy”, “The Tenth Circle”. Totally bus-safe.

And the “private” reading? Right now, that honor goes to Eric Jerome Dickey. Scadalous, drama-filled, soap operas that mainly take place in L.A. They’re filled with sex, cheating, lying, and lines like, “Quick, somebody give Grandma Cellulite a fun house mirror.” Seriously, you have to love it.

Don’t get me wrong, Dickey is a really good writer - detailed, with a definite voice, and he has carved out a style in fiction in much the same way that Tyler Perry has done with film. But not even his book titles are ok for the bus. “Milk in My Coffee”, “Pleasure”, “Naughty or Nice”. And his web site? It’s a black background, his music video-type book covers scrolling across the screen, a slow, bluesy song playing. It would make Jodi and her tulips blush. Every time I get on an Eric Jerome kick, my boyfriend shakes his head at me, points to one of the X-rated passages, and says, “I can’t believe what my girlfriend is reading. Eric Jerome Cocky.”

I was brave enough to cross the line last week, though. I gave it a shot. I took “The Other Woman” by Mr. Dickey on the bus. I made sure to hold it far enough down so that the cover didn’t show, but the problem was that in doing this, the woman sitting next to me and the man standing over me could easily read the words on the page. I just knew that one of them was reading the part about the “white French girl and her African-American boyfriend” who “put on a show for about thirty voyeurs.” And I also knew that they wouldn’t understand that actually, the book is very smart. It gets into the heart of relationships, peoples’ weaknesses, their faults, the way that they negotiate creating a life with someone else. So, with twenty minutes left to go on the bus, I abandoned my bravery, put it away, and finished it at home that night. And picked up “Liar’s Game” as soon as I was done.