Rec-ing Ball: Day One

Copypasta'd from 9/8/07:

Hey Guys,

The idea for this came last weekend, when I was chatting with one of the customers who regularly shops in the comics store I work at, Dr. No's. He comes in pretty much every week and we have a very similar taste in movies; maybe it's more like we both think the same ones are great. We chat every weekend, almost, about what movie we saw recently, how good it was, what was great about it, what's another great movie...

And for once we got on the subject of books. The "Dark is Rising" movie is coming out soon, and it was one of my favorite book series as a kid, next to Narnia, and I keep telling the guy I'll bring him my copy of the book to read, at which point I wound up telling him a few more great books, and he tells me he's off to the Library for them.

Not ten minutes later he's back in the store asking me where I come up with this stuff to recommend (or rec, since I'm such a fandom geek online).

Mostly I just pick it up along the way, like for The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (which I told him he has to read, if he wants to know what real horror writing is). I worked at the library the book came out and we had about thirty copies (or more) between 17 libraries, and the holds on the book were in the hundreds on each copy. That's like waving a flag for either controversy or greatness, and they had a sale on the book at Sam's Club so I picked it up.

The book scares me so bad I can't finish it. And it's so Hitchcock about it, where nothing happens to the characters but you're about to start screaming if something makes a noise in the room because the tension is amped up so high. Plus it's got vampires, a favorite of mine, and it's sort of secret society-ish, with a lot of history.

My advice: Don't read it late at night.

Or anther book that seemed to fall into my lap: The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst. It has a brilliant title, and originally one of the worst covers I've ever seen. I mean, ugly and nondescript. The cover you see now, if you follow that link is pretty, and awesome, and moody; just like the book deserves. It's even poignant, and if you read the book damned if it doesn't wrench at your heart every time you see it. It came across the counter at the library often enough that I recalled it, and kept wondering what it was about.

Finally I checked it out, and it's one of those read-it-in-one-sitting books. I don't usually read stuff that's not about magic and vampires and guns, ect, and this book is so slice of life... Basically, the main character comes home to find his wife is dead and the only witness is the family dog, and it turns out the husband is a linguistics professor at a college. Every other chapter is about how he met his wife and how they fell in love, and the other chapters are about him coping with his grief over her loss and trying to teach the family dog to tell him what happened.

It sounds goofy every time I say that, but it's not. He's not expecting the dog to speak, so much as maybe point at cards, or type a simple keyboard, like some animals have been taught to do (wasn't there a horse that did that? and a dog that had a barking code? I seem to recall it from Ripley's or a show on animal oddities), and it's so sad and sweet, and you can tell how much he's struggling with loosing his wife...

Anyway, read it, you'll cry. I did.

So, I rec'ed him those two, just like I'm recing them to you. Which is where I got the idea for this blog.