SICKBED READING

 I've been sick since Friday, still am pretty damn sick in fact, so when I've been able to read I've been reading junk novels.  But we like junk novels AND junk food, to everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven - right?  Right.  I finished The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett, which I think is actually a notch or two above "junk."  This is the first of multiple novels in a fantasy series called Discworld, and I will have to begin soon searching out the next volume.  Discworld is "...a flat, circular planet that rests on the backs of four elephants, which in turn are standing on the back of a giant turtle."  The things that happen there resemble things that happen here on our equally absurd planet, but are quite a bit different and quite a bit funnier.  Pratchett seems to write in the spirit of all my favorite British satirists and humorists: Beyond the Fringe, Kingsley Amis, Douglas Adams,  Monty Python, whoever it was wrote Cold Comfort Farm (can't remember the name right now,  TheraFlu is eating into the brain cells).  Wild adventures in this first one, of a bumbling wizard, a  tourist and his Luggage both visiting Ankh-Morpork. 

Next came California Girl, by T. Jefferson Parker.  This writer is new to me, though he has quite a list of published novels.  I read a review of this, his most recent, and got it and his first one from the library for snow weekend.  It's a mystery about California in the 1960's, though it begins a little earlier.  Demise of the orange groves, influx of people from all over the country, housing boom, drug culture, hippies, FBI, Nixon (it's Orange County, after all), the birth of Sunday drive-in church services.  Told more or less from the vantage point of a family of brothers, one of whom dies early on in Viet Nam, we have the Cop Brother, the Reporter Brother and the Preacher Brother.  It's kind of the poor woman's John Gregory Dunne, except in Dunne it would be the Priest Brother.  If you've read any of his books you know what I mean. I myself have not read  his last one, and need to remedy that.  Dunne is a better writer, but this was pretty good.  It kept me involved and turning pages, even though it's occasionally grittier than I prefer.

Just finished the most charming little book of retold fairy tales by Gregory Maguire.  This is a brandnew book, Leaping Beauty - and all the characters in the stories are animals.  I'm going to recommend this one to every child I know.  Some story titles:  Leaping Beauty,  Goldiefox and the Three Chickens,  Hamster and Gerbil (my personal favorite),  So What and the Seven Giraffes,  Little Red Robin Hood.  If you read these to your kids you will have a very good time, and perhaps even enjoy them more than they do. 

What next?  Not sure.  But I'll let you know when I figure it out.