Saturday Morning Cartoons...On Sunday

If you haven't already, please, oh please check out the Weekend Extras over at Book Ninja. Cha-booooon!

So Bad It's Good

Joe Queenan at the NY Times defends the pleasure in reading incredibly bad books:

Bad books have an important place in our lives, because they keep the brain active. We spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say a few pages down the road. One caveat: As with bad movies, a book that is merely bad but not exquisitely bad is a waste of time, while a genuinely terrible book is a sheer delight. This is what made the late, great Mickey Spillane so memorable: he never tried to write poor man’s Raymond Chandler books like Robert Parker; he wrote pure trash. I feel the same way about those “Loins of Telemachus” or “Cuirass of the Myrmidons” books that retell famous stories from the point of view of a marginal character. The dumber, the merrier.

Speaking of wonderfully bad movies, anyone remember "Snakes on a Plane?"...

"I Know What You Read Last Summer"

This is two weeks late but I just found this post on summer reading. Very, very funny with a few great reccomendations. I never think of my summer reading in this quite this way, but he makes it sound so fun that perhaps I should...

For me, summer reading is complicated, because I spend the months of June and July on the road. Every traveller knows the importance of packing light, but books tend to be on the heavy side. So leave them at home, you say. Not an option. Erasmus bought essentials like food and clothing with the change left over from acquiring new books, which makes perfect sense to me. I'm a book addict, a chain reader who finishes one novel and immediately starts the next. Sometimes I read two, three or even four books at a time. I can't go to sleep at night without reading.

Nine months out of the year, this isn't a problem. I'm surrounded by unread books. I've lined the walls with them, with stashes tucked away in closets and basements. So far, things haven't reached the point where I'm emptying the coffee jar and hiding a few paperbacks inside, but to be honest, I welcome that day.

Sound familiar?