Re: Comfort books

In article <fqop72lf6l3qv82nsr4kj8ln742f95a016@xxxxxxx>,
Howard Brazee <howard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You're significant other is out of town, and you have decided to curl
up with an old friend from the library tonight - tomorrow you will
attack your stack of unread books, but today your needs are different.

What book to you pull off the shelf?

No SO here; am I still eligible? (Unfortunately, the only people into
fat hairy guys these days seem to be other fat hairy guys, and I'm not
one of the latter.)

Interesting question. It would have to be a book I could skip
through, or otherwise short enough to finish in a night, which lets
out nearly all non-fiction for me, Bill Bryson's essay collections and
Peter Mayle's Provence books excepted. (I guess Asimov would qualify
there, too. Gould does not: he's too information-dense to read with
less than full attention.) On the fiction side, my default seems to
be Doyle as edited by Baring-Gould; some Lackey also works. I used to
go back to Robin McKinley and Diane Duane a lot, but haven't done so
recently. Haven't reread Narnia in years; ditto anything by
Heinlein. Julian May's /Saga of Pliocene Exile/ works, but for some
reason I haven't paid much attention to it lately.

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman | As the Constitution endures, persons in every
wollman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx | generation can invoke its principles in their own
Opinions not those | search for greater freedom.
of MIT or CSAIL. | - A. Kennedy, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003)
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Introducing bit-part characters
    ... have one friend whom I beat on for years to pay at least minimal ... attention to the prose -- she's at the extreme end of visual ... now that I do pay attention to it, some books have become ... but whatever-it-is is the thing that's essential to me for reading, ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: speed reading
    ... enjoying the prose or paying more attention in general, ... That may be your subjective impression. ... And because I can discuss books I've read that way ...
    (rec.arts.sf.written)
  • Re: Introducing bit-part characters
    ... but I have to pay a bit of extra attention to do it. ... and books that have striking images but only if you can get past the ... think that if they didn't, I would get bored and quit writing them, but ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: Introducing bit-part characters
    ... at the extreme end of visual readers, and just *could not* grasp that the ... stylistically beautiful books a lot more, so it's a tradeoff I don't ... visual reader...but I also don't pay a terrible lot of attention to style ... at the extreme ends of the scale in either direction -- i.e., ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: old school vs new school
    ... That's the old school. ... books and you have to read more to keep ahead of the pack, ... need to be paying attention of sometimes exchanging ideas with friends. ...
    (rec.gambling.poker)