From One Book Lover

A few days ago, my stepdaughter Valerie asked me if I had heard about/read/owned a few books. And my response was: What are you looking for, my pretty? To be fair, many of them I had read, owned, and would recommend. For example, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks   and   Everything I Never Told You  are two I am thrilled to recommend. I've heard good things about  Room, but I just cannot safely approach it. I started  Wild , but I couldn't get too far because it hit too close to home. I enjoyed the perspective of  Americanah , but I gave away my copy a week before Valerie mentioned it. So, I grabbed the handful of Jodi Picoult novels I had been collecting for her, tossed in a few others I really wanted to share with her (including one I had purchased an extra copy of, just in case ), and high-tailed it over to her place before she could change her mind. Oh, and on the top of the stack was the copy of Room from my library. I truly hope Valer...

I love books. I adore cheap books. Free books make me giddy. This summarizes my 2016 buying frenzy. With more than a little help from online vendors, I found dozens of inexpensive e-books and low-cost audiobooks to load on my Kindle. I subscribed to three different email services advertising cheap e-books. (Maybe four. Possibly five.) Book Bub and I are close friends. I haunt Amazon's Kindle e-book Web pages. Goodreads and I correspond regularly. My Kindle is so full, I don't know where to begin. (I'd tell you how many books are on there, but I don't want to count that high, then subtract expired library books. Lazy? Nah, man: survival.) So, without further ado, let me say: Hi, my name is Chris and I am a book hoarder. Don't get me wrong: I am thrilled, for the most part, by the e-books I have purchased. Some of them duplicate print books in my library. A few free ones may not be my exact cuppa, but don't mind a (cheap or free) gamble: how else would I...

2016 was a great year for reading. I consumed 80 books in three different formats, a personal best this century.  To be fair, a handful were children's books, but Goodreads assures me the average length of books on my "read" shelf in 2016 was 298 pages, so I rest easy with my total (thanks, Joe Hill!).   My Exceptional Reading Year included an inordinate (for me) number of re-reads: six books. For the most part, I credit this to catching up on original or first books before launching any sequel or companion books. However,  Good Omens was re-read via Audible just for fun — and it remains one of the funniest books I have read. Audiobooks changed my reading habits: one-fifth of the books I read this year were audiobooks, and three of those were re-reads. This format gives me an opportunity to read while I run or work out in the gym. I listened to Caitlin Moran read her immensely funny memoir, and I discovered Juliet Stevenson reading Sense and Sensibility . Audiob...