Hi. My name's HD, and I'm a bookaholic.
I know you know what it's like. The stray thoughts of cracking open a new volume and losing yourself in an alternate world that intrude when you should be thinking only about work.That edgy feeling you get when you're halfway through a book and don't have its successor ready to go on the table next to you.
Or maybe you feel safe only when you have a stack of books lined up (just a small one, mind you), because chances are you're a rapid reader, at least of those books that you read for pleasure (are there any other kind? Well, yes, if you're an academic -- but I digress), and having only standing by may not be enough.
Last night, with a new writing week ahead of me, I opened Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road and read it in one sitting (powerful, dark -- although ultimately not as dark as I had anticipated). That meant that when I went to bed around midnight, I faced the next day without a carrot in place for tonight, as my reward for a day spent writing.
It's not that I don't have books I haven't read or don't want to read. It's just that I don't think I can take Joan Didion right now (I'm afraid The Year of Magical Thinking will break my heart and cause me to go into freakout mode about all the terrible, life-altering things that could go wrong in an instant), and I'm not quite in the mood yet for Dickens again (though I'm looking forward to The Old Curiosity Shop).
So once I'd finished my quota of writing for the day, I went out and about to run errands. While picking up both high-end and low-end cat food (the former for our four strictly inside kitties, the latter for the three to four cats who tend to hang out in our back yard), I detoured to a nearby Target, specifically to find a couple of future reads at discount prices. (I felt rather like the alcoholic who buys a loaf of bread to camouflage the purchase of cheap wine or hooch).
Score!
Which is how I come to be looking forward this evening to Tana French's In the Woods (2007). I know nothing about it, had never heard of it, but I see by its cover that it was a New York Times bestseller, and USA Today claimed that "readers who like their hard-boiled police procedurals with an international flair will love Irish author Tana French's debut novel."
In the mood I'm in, that's good enough for me!
