Normally I’ll read the sum total of one book per year. It’s not an average I work hard to maintain, you understand, it’s just that I’ll really throw myself into anything I’m reading, usually going cover to cover in a short span of time. At the end of a reading frenzy like that I usually cant face another one for some time, hence my one book per year average.
Since the turn of this year, though, I just cant get enough of reading books. I started off the year with The Bone Collector by Jeffrey Deaver, but it was so predictably… shit… that I was really force feeding it to myself, and wasn’t in a great deal of hurry to work my way through it. That’s an alarm bell right there and then, for me. If I’m just not enjoying it I’m quite happy to cut my losses and walk away. If something doesn’t have me gripped by the first chapter or two then I’m quite content with not knowing how it all turns out.
So, after calling it quits on The Bone Collector, and getting back on the horse by reading Frank Skinner by Frank Skinner on holiday, the floodgates have opened. I finished that, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and Richard Asplin’s Gagged in little over a month. I’m up to 2008’s book quota already and it’s only March 2005.
I’ve hit a bit of a fork in the road, though. Crazy Uncle John asked me to find a book for him called The Facts of Life, which isn’t the sex education tome you’d expect from the title, oh no, it’s a fairly weighty book that deconstructs Darwinism and picks holes in the theory. Quoth Crazy Uncle John; “I have no problem with Darwins Theory of Evolution, other than the way it’s taught in classrooms as if it were fact rather than just a theory.”
I found myself agreeing with said uncle.
I tracked the book down on Amazon and I have it all lined up to follow Gagged, which I finished at the weekend. But then work bought me The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and some chick I’ve never heard of. So now I have a bit of a problem.
Both books are going to be pretty dry compared to the material I’ve read so far this year. I’m almost certain that neither of them are going to be the laugh-per-page that Gagged turned out to be. And, although The Facts of Life will probably serve me a whole lot more fact based questions about modern society than The Da Vinci Code provoked, I doubt it’ll be quite the bed time page turner that the latter was.
Tricky.
If I make a wrong move here I probably wont be reading again until 2009. (I had to say 2009 there because 2010 made the sentence rhyme and that was just distracting.)
My gut tells me to go with The Zen of CSS Design, although The Facts of Life has me more intrigued. Y’see, it’s not an easy choice, is it?
