Vacation Reads

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend. ~Paul Sweeney

 

I was on vacation last week.  We went to South Dakota.  We visited Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park, Devils Tower (over the boarder in Wyoming), Wind Cave, and the Black Hills.  It was fun.  It was a lot of driving.  A lot.  Which meant that I got to read a fair amount.  I brought three books with me.  I picked the wrong one to start with.

Guess what I had to do after a couple days.  That's right, find a store to buy Catching Fire, the second in the series.  Guess what I had to do a few days after that.  Yep, get the third, Mockingjay.

We've had the first book here at the library for several years.  The book first came out in 2008, and it silently sat on our shelves.  Once it got picked up to be made into a movie, it started going out a bit more.  The previews started playing, and we saw the book less and less.  Now the movie has been in theaters for a while, and it's been a couple months since we've even seen our copy of it.  The other two books in the trilogy have been making their way around the Arrowhead Library System on request after another as well.  There are long request lists for all of these books.  Good thing I had a friend loan me her copy. 

It was one of those books that I had picked up and put back time and time again.  Trapped in a car for a long (and honestly, boring) ride is always a good time to bring a book like that along.  I should have started the other couple books I brought along first.  That's a twenty five dollar mistake.  I should have waited longer to start the book.  I should have waited until the number of requests for it went down so that I could have gotten library books.  Lesson learned?  Probably not.

This is not my first experience with finding out that a book I keep coming back to and yet wait to check out is a really good read.  There's a reason I keep coming back to it.  There's also a reason I keep putting it back.  I'm generally not sure what that reason is once I finally read something I've been putting off.

Which other books fell into this category?  Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child,  High Five by Janet Evanovich (not the first in the series),  Forrest Gump by Winston Groom, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larssen.  These were all books that lead to others by the same author.  Many of them you may recognize.  And yet, I hesitated to read them for some reason.  They now all rate among my favorite books.

If you visit your library and keep returning to the same book time after time only to look at it and then place it back on the shelf, think about bringing it with you the next time you're going to be left with no other choice but to read it.  You may find out it is a dud, but you may find that it ranks among your favorites.

One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else's imaginary friends, at all hours of the night. 

~Dr. SunWolf