Been travelin' for the holiday break. Took the little one to Orlando primarily to take a gander at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter located in Universal's Island of Adventure. It's wonderful and detailed and perfect in every way except for it's size. They need to knock down The Lost Continent next door and double Harry Potter's World. Seriously.
Then we dropped down to Sarasota to visit my parents and enjoyed a home cooked Thanksgiving.
Reading occurred as well. I'm listening to the forever long Game of Thrones and am about half way through The Sisters Brothers which I am just loving. We're also hitting The Deathly Hallows as a family. We're mostly letting Jim Dale read it to us, but I got to read a couple of chapters out loud in the car on the drive.
My mom was a bit chapped with her book club. They don't have a strict paperback only rule in her group and some yahoo picked Gone Girl. I'm sure Gone Girl is fine but even heavily discounted it's too much. And it's too popular to request from the library and get in time. And who likes hardbacks really? Nobody but librarians and gift-givers. She was especially miffed because she had suggested a book earlier but received a sniffy email informing her that it wasn't in paperback yet. Then they turn around and pick Gillian Flynn's Book of the Moment in hardcover. I'm definitely not a Book of the Moment kind of person, so I completely understand my mom's pain. I think five years is a good amount of time. If a book was great when it came out in 2007 or earlier, then it's still great. If I had read The Da Vinci Code or Marley and Me back then because some numbnuts in my book club picked them and I'd had to buy them in hardback? It would not have been pretty. But The Book Thief and Anansi Boys are still just as awesome as ever. I mean I just now got around to Cloud Atlas and it was great.
Waiting for a paperback also gives you time to hear enough reviews and feedback on a book before you get around to it. There are plenty of books that have come out by writers I love that look just great there in the book store and have winning blurbs from other writers I also love. But after the nine to twelve months it takes for the book to come out in a more affordable format it has lost some of it's shine and in a more realistic light I see that it's not up to that writer's usual standards. Plus some of that stuff turns out to just be a scam. Just think about the poor bastards who bought A Million Little Pieces or Three Cups of Tea in hardback. Suckers.
Anyway, it was a nice break and I'm looking forward to getting through the next three and a half weeks of nuttiness to get to the next break. We have no plans to travel for that one so I'm hoping for even more reading time. I just picked up Joe Queenan's new one, One for the Books, at the library and it will probably give me a whole bunch of titles to add to my TBR list. Oh, and yes, it's brand new and in hardback but it's okay! Because I got it at the library!
