When you can’t get around very well on your own, hopefully, you spend quite a bit of your time reading. In my case most of it was role-playing game stuff as I am a very much a geek. I avoided reading news papers and magazines as I wanted little to do with the current events of a world that it felt like I could interact with so seldom at the time. I would like to talk a little bit about the other reading I engaged in while I was recovering from my broken knee, a lot of which was done while I traveled the bus back and forth to, and in the waiting rooms of, my various medical appointments.
I greatly enjoyed reading All Tomorrows Parties and Pattern Recognition, both by William Gibson. Gibson’s novel Count Zero was my introduction into the dystopian, corporation dominated, futurist world of literature known as Cyberpunk as a teenager; a genre that my budding gamer mind latched on to and had a lot of fun with throughout the years. His works are well crafted with a good blend of just enough technical jargon to set the background of his world and rich character development. During this time I also started once again to read The Difference Engine, a book that Gibson co-authored with Bruce Sterling. I enjoy my attempts at reading this particular work but for some reason I always seem to put it down about halfway through and forget about it until the library sends me an overdue notice.
I managed to get through a short story collection by Richard Matheson, which included I am Legend, It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t that great either I think I liked the other less well-known stories; perhaps that is because they seemed a bit less tired, since there haven’t been film adaptations of them.
I, for some inexplicable reason, actually read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson. By the end of that book I decided that, where he not already dead, I would have organized a posse to fly to Sweden and lynch him for ever putting pen to paper.The real puzzler about it is that he managed to publish two more books with the same characters. Seriously I spent the entire novel waiting for it to engage me, or get me to even remotely care about his dispassionate and irreparably dysfunctional characters; and it never did, it was even boring when the protagonists lives were in peril yet some how all three of the books in this series spent weeks, nay months on the best seller lists. I suspect it has something to do because he tied it into Nazis, sexual deviance, and computer hacking. The first installment was such a chore to read that I can’t fathom making an attempt at the others. But that is just my opinion and I am allowed to be wrong.
I reread several of the Discworld novels, a series which will never get old for me. I am a huge fan of Terry Pratchett and if you haven’t been reading his work then you are missing out on some of the greatest satirical fantasy literature. I especially recommend any of the books that involve the characters of Samuel Vimes and the Ankh Morpork city watch.
The worst book for me to read while going through something like this is Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson. First off despite the narrator staring off being a less than moral person that spends the better part of the book convincing you of what a giant turd he is, he is suffering an injury and a resulting ordeal that was so much worse than mine it made me even more angry when I was trying to properly feeling sorry for myself. Second My timing of reading this book is that every time he mentions anything about physical therapy or recovery, it managed to be the very thing that I wound dealing with either later the same day or the following one, immediately after I read it; this resulted in some very disconcerting feelings of deja vu and mild paranoia that was made worse by opiate pain killers. And third it is a smarmy story of love that can never be physically consummated and is told through a series of mildly aggravating asides involving past lives. Setting aside the fact that this is basically just a romance novel with a twist, it is very well written; especially the very rich and detailed descriptive in the opening chapter. I firmly, will file this book under one that was a guilty pleasure to read.
There were others to be sure but these stick out in my memory after the past couple of years.
Corned Beef Hashtag 