Literary Potato Chips

I've been looking for a book to read. I've been wanting to read Steve Lopez's The Soloist for awhile, but unwilling to pay full price, or even near full price on http://www.half.com/. It's taken a bit of patience, but finally I found a used copy at a decent price, but I now must wait for media mail, which is the postal equivalent of strapping the book to the shell of a snail and sending it forth.

Meanwhile, I took a step off the beaten path for me by getting into Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Serices (aka the Sookie Stackhouse series) which the HBO show 'True Blood' is based upon. The first book come from being between books, at Target, and possessed by a desire to see how the original book differed from the series (i.e. I wanted to rip it apart), but then it became like potato chips, one after another after another, until now the wait is on for the ninth book in the series, due out in May 2009. They're a hoot, both funny and weird, and strangely addictive. And it takes the mental wherewithal of a sea slug to follow the plots.

So in the span of about one per day, I went through:

1. Dead Until Dark
2. Living Dead in Dallas
3. Club Dead
4. Dead to the World
5. Dead as a Doornail
6. Definitely Dead
7. All Together Dead
8. From Dead to Worse

And I can't wait until The Soloist arrives and I'm back to reading something that isn't going to damage my three remaining brain cells, meanwhile I'm into Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford, thanks to a blurb on the cover by Lisa See, another of my favorite authors (who should get back to writing books instead of promotional blurbs, IMHO.)

Bonus: I just scoped out Amazon.com and Lisa See has a new novel coming out in May, Shanghai Girls (hint: would make an EXCELLENT Mother's Day present), and Pat Conroy will have a new novel, South of Broad, coming out in September 2009. And another the next vampire potato chip, Dead and Gone, will also be out in May, just in case one of those three brain cells is getting ornery and needs to be bumped off.