Never mind my huge stack of current reading; this afternoon I picked up Atonement again, which I started early last month (only to abandon it somewhere around page 22 before moving on to other books).

While clearing off my nightstand this morning I re-discovered it amid the tottering stack of books and papers, and figured I might as well give it another go. After all, it's been so highly praised, by so many intelligent readers and reviewers--I thought that maybe if I'd stuck with it I would have fallen under its spell and understood what all the fuss was about.

No such luck. I can say I finished it, but I simply could not connect with the characters. Nor could I bring myself to care all that much about their stories, even as I recognized what compelling, tragic stories those were. And while, at the end, I finally understood why the book was written in a particular way, and from a particular point of view, those were the things that left me cold.

I like action. I like dialogue. I like to figure things out for myself. I want to be dropped into the middle of the story and shown the things I need to know, not told about them. And while McEwan's prose is drop-dead gorgeous (without ever calling undue attention to that fact), I found myself wondering, "Okay, when does all this beautifully-crafted exposition end, and when does the story actually start?"

So yes, I'm disappointed, even as I can see why it's received so much praise. It's just not my cup of tea.

And now I'm back to wrestling with Twilight, a book that has so many faults I hardly know how to start writing about them.

Since last night, we've had an unusually heavy and prolonged thunderstorm here in the Seattle area. I woke up at 6:00 AM when it was at its peak, only to find all of the cats huddled under my desk. They looked at me as if to say, "Mom? You can make this shit stop, can't you?"

Sorry, kids.

Today it's cool, damp and rainy, with thunder still pounding in the distance. Perfect reading weather, in other words. So there's no doubt as to where I'll be this afternoon.

I have several books in the works right now. I'm almost done with the first free-box book, and have started writing my review. I also started skimming a second free-box book, and was so taken with it that I've had to put it away--I already love it so much I know I'm going to let everything else go to hell just to read it, then rave about it. But I honestly don't have the time to do it right now; there's just too much on my plate. So I've put it aside until next month.

Currently, I'm making my way through the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. They seem to be very popular with teenage girls and even with some adult women, and their fans are quite passionate about their love for these books (to put it mildly). I am not quite through the first book, Twilight, but--well--let's just say I have already formed some very strong opinions of it, of Meyer, and by extension the series as a whole. Once I've managed to finish the books and organize those opinions, I'll post reviews. The next book in the series, Breaking Dawn, will be released on August 2nd, so I expect to have my reviews up on or before that date.

July 21st marks the one-year anniversary of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As a shameless Harry Potter fan and as a writer I'll admit there were a few things in it that disappointed me, but in the main I liked the book and thought it a fitting end to the series. Over the course of the last year, however, a very small, very vocal minority of hardcore Harry Potter fans has continued to piss and moan about how terrible they think Deathly Hallows was, and what a failure as a writer and human being JK Rowling is, and how she ruined the whole series by ending it as she did. I think these people are all bonkers, myself, and that it's high time they found something else to read and obsess over (and I'll gladly give them download links to the Twilight series, in order to facilitate that).

But I can at least agree that no, Deathly Hallows wasn't perfect, and yes, there were certainly things that could have been done differently--or not done at all. So during this month, in honor of the one-year anniversary of the conclusion of the Potter series, I'm going to re-read all seven books. As a writer, Rowling has a lot to teach about keeping people guessing, and confounding their expectations with each new book. She also has a remarkable ability to pull the reader along into the story, and keep them moving forward, despite the fact that she's not the greatest prose stylist. I'm not sure that ability to hook the reader can be learned--I think it's a storytelling gift, not a writing skill--but for myself I'd like to take a shot at analyzing it.

Mostly, I'm concerened with plotting issues (especially subplots), and loose threads, and maybe even what happens when an author's invented world turns out to be too rich and too full to be contained within the series. I thoroughly enjoyed the Harry Potter books, and think they can provide some valuable lessons to anyone who wants to write for young people. I think there's a lot of lessons in them about writing fantasy that breaks free from the genre ghetto and finds a bigger audience. However, I already know they also contain some shining examples of How Not to Write. Whether they will turn out to be the same ones I'm thinking of right now remains to be seen.

So my plan is to post my thoughts on each book in the coming weeks, with those for Deathly Hallows to come on the 21st. After that, I'll make at least one or two posts about the series as a whole.

And in between reading, analyzing, and reviewing all those books? I've got writing to do. I have ideas for three historical YA mystery-adventure novels, and I'd like to get them plotted and outlined by the end of the month.

Good god, but it's going to be a busy month. Oh, well.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have a stack of old paperbacks that, for various reasons, have no cash value. Rather than give them away or toss them out, I thought I'd read them, if only to satisfy my curiosity.

Months ago, I had a conversation ith a friend in which I proposed starting a blog to review out-of-print and otherwise forgotten books. My criteria for choosing those books was that they would be culled from the free boxes in front of a local used book store. In all that junk, I imagine, there must be some treaures--right?

I plan to write about all kinds of books here, but I still like that old idea. So I'm goint to try to make It Came from the Free Box a regular feature. ( And to get started, here's a list of the free-box books I currently have on hand: )

Whether I'll get to all of these remains to be seen; if something else comes along that looks worthwhile I won't hesitate to read it instead. But there's a few books on this list I've already read long ago, and while I think I know what to expect from them it's been well over 20 years since I last picked them up. One of them I haven't read in over 30 years. So revisisting those books ought to be interesting.

There are also some categories of fiction that are over-represented on this list. In particular, "Gothics" (which would nowadays be marketed as "Romantic Suspense") and a category I simply call 1970s Family Sagas. There's no SF or fantasy, and only two works of nonfiction, but then again it's not meant to be a comprehensive reading list in any way. I have no system for choosing books; this is just the stuff that's crossed my path so far. There is, however, a pretty good mix of good, bad, and unknown quality, so there's plenty of room for surprises.

As far as choosing which books to review and when, it'll simply be a matter of picking what I feel like reading. In fact, I'm already reading one of them. I won't say which one, but I will tell you this: it stinks on ice, and reviewing it's going to be fun...

I've beeen clearing out boxes of old books that have taken up far too much space in my garage for far too long. I used to be a used-book dealer, and most of these books are leftover inventory; others are just odds and ends I've accumulated since. Of the boxes I've sorted through so far (16 out of 157), I've kept a little less than three boxes' worth (and I may yet cull those). The rest I'm disposing of by various means.

Some I've listed on either Half.com or Amazon. Some I've sold to Powell's. Some are in boxes, waiting to be taken to a local used bookstore.

But then there's the rejects, which are actually the bulk of what's there. Of the 16 boxes I mentioned, I had nine boxes of rejects.

Many of them have no cash value simply because there are too damned many of them on the market. Just about anybody who would bother to read them has already done so, and there are more than enough used copies for those who haven't. Some of them were once big bestsellers (John Grisham's The Client, for example), but I'd be hard pressed to find a buyer at any price, even for copies in mint condition. The same goes for Harlequin and Silhouette romances; I had two boxes of those, and only one (a Nora Roberts title) was in demand.

Others are books for which there would be a market if only they were in better condition. There are still too many Very Good or Like New copies available cheaply, so why go to the trouble to list one in merely Good condition, taking the time to describe its faults?

Still others--mostly self-help and diet books--are former bestsellers long since past their vogue, and don't have a cult following still willing to buy copies. The Dance-Away Lover. The Hilton Head Diet. That sort of thing. A lot of humor books (Bill Cosby's Love and Marriage) and nonfiction (anything dealing with politics, or then-current events) fall into the same category.

So what do you do with ostensibly worthless books? I've put several boxes of them in the alley, behind my garage, with a FREE BOOKS sign. If passerby don't find something they want to read, maybe they'll take them over to Half Price Books and try their luck. They won't have any luck, but at least the books will be out of my hair. A small number--those in the worst condition--have ended up in the recycling bin, because yes, books do have a lifespan, and those were clearly at its end.

But I also held back a few, just out of curiosity. Some are books I'd never heard of; others were bestsellers when I was a kid (or before I was born) that have since been forgotten; some were made into movies I've seen; others were the sorts of grown-up books I (as a precocious kid) grew up reading; and a couple looked so appallingly godawful as to be (potentially) hilarious.

I do plan to read them, and write about them here. After all, one of them could be a forgotten gem. Or maybe they'll all be so bad I'll be able to prove one of my favorite arguments--that today's bestsellers are no more mindless and poorly-written than they've ever been.

I thought I'd dust off this journal and finally put it to good use. So here I go...

I'm a hopeless daydreamer. Always have been. Part of my affliction has been the unwavering desire to write novels. Why keep all these stories and characters bottled up in my head? Why not write it all down, and see if I can get it published? The stuff that flits through my brain is frequently no weirder than the stuff that makes it into print, after all.

Making the transition from amateur to professional daydreaming has turned out to be much more difficult than I anticipated, however. I'm still not there yet. Daydreams are unruly, after all; they like to go off on tangents, hop fences, repeat and cycle back on themselves, and wallow in some pretty unsavory backwaters of the psyche. Turning them into novels means teaching them how to sit, stay, and heel. It also means training them not to chase after cars, bite the postman, or chew on my shoes.

It's taken several years to learn how to make my daydreams behave themselves--or at least not pee on the floor. Some of that learning came from well-known writers, who offered advice through articles on their websites, or through books on writing. Most of it, however, came from reading a lot of books and taking them apart to see how they worked. How do you juggle multiple points of view? How do you interweave multiple storylines? Why do some characters come alive on the page, and others don't? How do you build tension?

These are all things I've learned about (and continue to learn about) by reading, and analyzing what I've read. I read classics and I read potboilers. I read genre fiction and I read "literary" fiction. I read erotica and I read kids' books. I read the latest bestsellers and I read long-forgotten books from decades past. I buy books brand new in hardcover, and I filch them from the trash.

Bad and mediocre books teach me just as much as good ones do, because knowing How Not to Write is part of knowing how to do it successfully. So while I expect to write mostly about books I like, that have influenced me, and that I admire for whatever reasons, I expect I'm going to write about the shit, too.