Tired of Vampires

I had a realization today while taking my shower.

That is, currently I'm not very interested in supernatural books.

I guess I knew this subconsciously.  But today the idea made itself more concrete in my head.

I'm tired of vampires, witches and ghosts.

I'm not feeling overly excited about magical children, although I did somewhat enjoy Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children.

Now that I think of it.  Maybe my adventures with Library Man would have been more successful if I had been in my supernatural-book mood.  But I wasn't.  I don't hate supernatural books. But I'm tired of them, so I'm more picky when it comes to that type of book.  

I think my thing right now is historical fiction.

Today I finished reading a beautiful book written by Christopher Koch.  He's the guy who wrote The Year of Living Dangerously.  I didn't read that one.  I read Highways to a War.  It's about an Australian news photographer in Vietnam and Cambodia during the wars.  

I liked the narration method in the novel. The photographer goes missing, and his boyhood friend tries to write the photographer's memoirs by listening to his left behind audio diary and interviewing his war-time friends.  It was a bit confusing for me in the beginning, but then I began to manage things.

Now I'm reading a Geraldine Brooks novel.  Caleb's Crossing  Brooks is an Aussie; but the book isn't about Australia.  It's about an English girl in the America area who befriends a Native American. It takes place in the 1600's. So far, I'm liking it.

A week or so ago I read one of those novels that's about a real painting...you know sort of like Girl With A Pearl Earring.

This one was called The God of Spring.  Like the Caleb book it's by an Aussie, but not about Australia. It's about a French painter I had never heard of before, Théodore Géricaul.  

I almost quit this book because I read it after reading two chick lit novels. My brain wasn't in the mood for heavier material.

But I've become better at quitting books... to the point that maybe I've improved that skill too much.   I've quit a handful of books lately.

So...I felt obligated to try stick to stick with this god of spring thing. 

I'm glad I did.

I ended up liking it a lot.

The book dealt with the subject of major obsession.  I find obsessions fascinating.

It also dealt with survival cannibalism, one of my favorite subjects. The custom of the sea.....

Several weeks ago I read another great book-about-a-real-painting.

This one had an American author, I believe. It was about the massacre of the Basque people in Spain during World War II.   Picasso did a painting based on the event—Guernica.  That's the name of the painting, the town...and the novel.  

I read one novel fairly recently that was a mix of history and supernatural. That was pretty cool.  It was about a witch during the witch trial days. Well, actually the story moved through time, because the witch's aging process slowed down. One section of the novel dealt with Jack-the-Ripper.  

I really love reading.  To me, the library is like this magic time machine. You walk around and choose where and when you want to travel to.

I was joking once with Fruitcake about getting one of those body-switching spells; you know where you get to spend some time in someone else's shoes.  With books, you kind of get to do that.

As for my worries of not doing enough and being enough....

Books let me do it all.

I've been to magic school.

I've had a romance with a vampire.

I've walked the Ho Chi Minh Trail and got horrible ulcers on my feet. 

I returned to middle school.

I explored Broome.

I escaped from zombies.

I toured Poland with a survivor of the Holocaust.

I became a singer in France.  

I've had SO many adventures. 

How would our world change if we knew for sure there was life after death, and it was easy for our dearly-beloved to talk to us via the Internet?   

The Dead are Online, a novel by Dina Roberts