Confessions of a Reading Addict ....

I have a lot of what I euphemistically call ‘down time’.

Basically because:

A) I am incredibly lazy
B) I am ill more often than I care to admit
C) Pretty much there is no ‘C’ since A and B take up 100% of my time …

When I am confined to bed, my mind tends to wander – as you can imagine. This is no good for someone who needs to keep a sharp mental focus on ‘not focusing on the pain’ which actually takes a lot of mental effort – well, for me …

So I read. My reading system is complicated and very uncomplicated all at the same time. I have many rules – and they all lead back to that ‘focus’ part.

Main Rules:

1) No … I don’t know what to call them – church-ey, uplifting, inspirational books? I guess all of the above. I know, I know – y’all think it is because I am evil … and there IS that, but in addition – they tend to make me verklempt (Sorry – I had a very close Jewish friend at my last job and learned ever so much Yiddish and no other word feels right here) thus losing my focus, then on to the sobbing and the kvetiching (ooops, yet again …) and my pain spirals right out of control.

2) No self-help books. Why? I LOVE to buy them, but never read them. Somewhere inside me I am TOTALLY convinced that if the book is in my house I will learn whatever skill is being introduced by osmosis. Totally not working out all that well for me so far, thus I have put the kibosh on any and all further purchases of self-help books. Especially since, if you actually read them – THEY WANT YOU TO DO STUFF …

3) Pretty much anything else other than mystery and adventure novels. I would LOVE to say I am so into history that the last book I read was “America in the Gilded Age: Third Edition” but no – I would rather barf up a lung than read that book – go figure.

Here’s the thing … I read fast. Really fast. I don’t speed read – although I did learn how – it just takes too much concentration and I am very out of practice – but still – pretty fast. If I am in bed, or being especially lazy I can read 2 books a day. And now with my handy little kindle … I can just download books to my heart’s content hitting that

“Buy now with 1-Click”

button. It can become rather pricey.

OK – so that does not look like many rules – but it really just comes down to that the only thing I can read and still stay emotionally stable – thus keeping my pain in control - is books on murder and mayhem. Yes, you would think that I would care, but I don’t. You would think that I would prefer to keep this a secret – but who knows? Based on what I have been writing here in my blog lately – this may bring me up to a whole new level of ‘normalcy’ in some people’s eyes!

I have had to become very creative this past four or five months since I ran out of books by my ‘regular’ authors. I have researched the best books of 2009, 2010, 2011 (in the mystery / adventure section of course) and then looked up the authors and started to expand my horizons.

I just peeked at my Amazon “Manage Your Kindle” section to refresh my memory on my newfound authors and did a wee mental “eeek!” The thing about these authors is that they generally crank out a book every year or so, and when you are reading two a day – you need to have a HUGE stockpile of authors. I hadn’t run into this problem until this year – thus the researching – checking out the author and then going back to the first book in the series and reading all the books in order. Starting sometime in April – this is what I have read:

John Locke – Donovan Creed novels plus a few others (10 books)

Robert Crais – Elvis Cole & Joe Pike (two of my most favorite sleuths) (7 books)

John Lescroart – Dismas Hardy and others (23 books)

John Lutz – Frank Quinn (13 books)

James Thompson – Kari Vaara – an Inspector in Finland (sadly – only 3 books)

Jo Nesbø – Harry Hole – an Inspector in Norway (pronounced Haaarrrrry Hula) (10 books)

Reed Farrel Coleman – Moe Praeger, Joe Serpe and Dylan Klein (14 books)

And my current fave author: Robert B Parker – he has 3 series going – I have read all of one and moved on to the next one:

Sunny Randall – (6 books)

And now I am reading the “Spenser” series with …


wait for it …





wait for it …





FOURTY BOOKS!!!!

I don’t know how he cranked them out and I am on the sixth and don’t have that anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach of ‘what evah am I going to read next?” I am thrilled! The dialogue is funny, snappy and interesting and Spenser (I cannot remember his first name – it is rarely used …) is exceptionally intelligent and well read – which gives me that feeling of inferiority with a little bit of incentive to pick up something other than a trashy mystery novel – but I have yet to succumb to this temptation.

So – I am in BOOK HEAVEN. I am going to keep reading, laughing, sleuthing, pain ignoring, and TOTALLY not think about how much this is going to cost me ….

And yet, now that I wrote that I don’t have that fear of what to read next in the pit of my stomach – there is a little voice in my head telling me that if I look up there and do the math on what I have read in the last couple of months …. forty ain’t all that much.



Any suggestions?


Keep in mind if you make me weep openly I will hunt you down and hurt you …