Thursday, March 12, 2009

Need Help!!!!!

I'm going away for a week next week and have a very big problem: I don't know what books to bring.

I mentioned that I visited the library a couple of weeks ago and checked out an array of random, interesting-looking books. Well, I got them home and found out that none of them really appealed to me that much. So today, I brought them all back with the intention of starting over. And nothing!

I didn't go home empty-handed. In addition to experiencing the worst BO ever -- twice -- from my fellow patrons, I got four books. One was David Copperfield. One was by Ana Castillo, who wrote a great book that I read in college and was featured in their staff picks. The other two? I picked them out less than an hour ago and I'll be damned if I can remember. Doesn't bode well for my actually reading and enjoying them.

I thought that looking at my TBR list would help. It didn't. In fact, all it did was convince me to reassess the list. There are several books on there that only made the list because I wound up with them somehow. I'm not sure how much I actually want to read them.

So, I'm looking for recommendations from anyone reading this blog. My criteria are as follows:

1. It can't be a brand new book. Those are 7 days and will be overdue by the time I get back, even if I wait until the very last minute to check them out.

2. It should be a decent vacation book. Not too heavy in either subject matter or in..errr...actual matter.

3. But it has to be decent. Something a little bit different. I don't want to read another book about a girl with a shitty job who wants Laboutin shoes and a boyfriend. And I'm not yet at the phase in my life where a book about a woman with a decent job who wants a new living room set and a baby would interest me either.

4. It can also be a good biography or autobiography. By "good," of course, I mean "bad." Any celebrities who've led interesting or colorful lives that you can recommend, I'll check out. Unfortunately, someone broke the only copy of Slash's autobiography. That would've been just the thing, but it showed as "under repair" in the library's database.

Any other thoughts or ideas? I'm open-minded at this point.

1 comment:

Juliann in WA said...

I just read The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and really enjoyed it. A young adult book so not a tough read but a great story. And have you read the Isabelle Dalhousie series by Alexander McCall Smith - the first one is the Sunday Philospher's club - set in Edinburgh a good vacation read.