New Books

The Girl and I went to the library on Friday as I was fast approaching the end of the last in the Dragons of Pern books that I had on-hand. I knew it would be closed on Monday and I wanted to make sure I had books through the weekend since it’s really the only time other than bedtime that I’m guaranteed to have any time to read. We even went to the big library downtown. Our library is much newer, but also much smaller. And I must say that I was a wee bit disappointed. I made a very specific list of books that I was looking for. Granted, several of those books are older, but I also know they were extremely popular so I didn’t think I’d have any trouble finding what I was looking for. Turns out I was pretty wrong.

The list I made had a pretty nice mix of sci-fi/fantasy and mystery/suspense; my thought being that I just swap back and forth as I made my way through to determine which authors I really liked and then I’d go back and get more of those authors. Except that I couldn’t the most of James Patterson’s Alex Cross series, pretty much only the newer ones. I couldn’t find any of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series; I couldn’t find any of Catherine Coulter’s FBI series. They only had two Ray Bradbury on the shelves. They only had a handful of Neil Gaiman. I was not happy. I was able to find Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, thank goodness. But I was still seriously disappointed by the lack of depth in these overwhelming popular and prolific authors.

Thankfully, my dad is a total mystery/suspense junky. So he said he’d go through his bookshelves and pull his favorites for me to get while the kids and I are there for their ridiculously long Spring Break. So I’ll have that to look forward to at least. Because I did find one James Patterson book that sounded fairly interesting. And I’m here to tell you that if the rest of his writing is this bad, I don’t want much to do with him.