Light Reading

I've been on the search for something good to read lately, and I think I may have found it. A while ago, Seth loaned me a book called The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history where the black death wiped out 99% of Europe rather than 30%, so Islam and Buddhism grew to tbe the world's dominant religions, colonize the Americas, and so on. The premise sounded great; the execution, for lack of a better word, sucked. Kim Stanley Robinson (author of the Red Mars series) seemed far more interested in showing off his knowledge of Asian culture than in telling a good story.

Seth then loaned me The Philosophy of Horror, which is a fascinating nonfiction look at horror - why we read it or watch it, what the internal machinations are that attract us to it, and so on. It's not exactly light reading, so I've been going through it slowly. I'll read a few pages here and there, but it's not the kind of book I can spend an afternoon on.

A few days ago, Liz and I went to Barnes and Noble just to browse around. I needed to grab a copy of the Rider-Waite tarot deck for the game I've been working on, but otherwise had no goal. A book called House of Leaves sat on one of their "staff recommendation" shelves. "Best novel ever," some of the staff gushed. OK, I picked it up and looked through.

It looks like a combination of Nabokov's Pale Fire, a haunted-house horror story, and a meditation on the nature of films and movies. What's not to love? I bought it. I started reading it, and I love it. It's going to take me a while to finish, but since I'm leaving for a few days in the near-future, I'll have a nice long planeride all by my lonesome so I can get some good reading done.