After a year of silence, I just wanted to pop in and say "Hi! I'm reading Dracula!"

If you've never read it, you might not know that Dracula is told in this pretty cool epistolary format, including first-person journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, etc. The first part of the novel, comprised of journal entries made by Jonathan Harker, a London solicitor who is summoned to remote Transylvania to aid this aged, eccentric nobleman with a London land deal, is really well done, and I'm trying to read it as if I were a late Victorian with no prior knowledge of Dracula or vampire legend. (As if!). Anyway, this "Dracula" fellow seems not to be up to any good.

In other news, I've started my own blog that describes working in a branch at CPL. I'll always have to thank Wrybrarian for opening me to the pleasures of blogging, and even though I've had little to say about the books I've been reading, it has remained an incentive to me to read more, and more importantly, a window into all the things I HAVEN'T been reading. Thanks Wrybrarian!

I have a new favorite magazine, and you should too. Radar is kinda like a cross between US and The John Stewart Show. It’s all the celebrity dirt you could imagine, just well reported. I’d write more, but I can’t get my nose out of the print issue I started reading on the bus this morning (there's some fascinating coverage of the alleged sexual assault on camera of Girls Gone Wild mogul Jon Francis. Not that I would ever, ever, ever endorse making light of somebody being forced to film humiliating sexual acts. But if anybody ever asked for it, well, Mr. Francis, that's what we call karma biting you in the ass. Er, no pun intended).

I have a new posting technique. I’m actually taking my own advice and writing these suckers out on Word before I try to get Blogger to interface with my service provider. Yes, I am a genius, and it’s only taken me eight or nine years as a content developer to discover this groundbreaking method.

So what did I read on tour? I’m glad you asked.

Winners

The Weavers of Saramyr by Chris Wooding – Just when I thought I’d read all the literary fantasies out there, and that there are no more Neil Gaimans, Phillip Pullmans, C.S. Lewises, or the like to discover, I stumbled on the first of 28-year-old Chris Woodings’ Braided Path Trilogy.

How can you go wrong with a beautiful young outcast with special powers who has suffered terrible tragedy, a princess in grave danger and a blight upon a kingdom that might have come out of the latest Japanese Anime feature? Anytime a book draws me in so much that I foget what I’m doing, and who I am, I feel lucky. And luckier still that I have two more left to finish.

Fluke, or I know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore – A dedicated whale scientist and his quirky team set out to unravel the mystery of the whale they spot, with “Bite Me” lettered neatly on its Fluke. Weird, witty and funny, this should be a delight for anybody who’s ever donated to Greenpeace. Like, ahem, me.


Losers
half of Staying Dead – Yes I’m a nerd, but don’t think for a second that a few fuzzy demons and magic spells will detract from the fact that a book is lacking literary value. I should know—I’m the queen of reading books without literary value.


Read the last page, didn’t like how it ended, so stopped reading halfway through
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult – Seriously, I do this ALL this time. It’s embarrassing, but I’ve been reading this way for years. I just have to know the ending before I devote time to the entire novel. But other than that, My Sister’s keeper is an interesting moral tale about a teenager whose birth was originally planned to provide genetic material for her cancer-ridden older sister.