Seen on the subway this week: a high schooler reading Club Dead , the third book in the Southern Vampire Mysteries series by Charlaine Harris, which HBO’s True Blood is based on. We read the first in the series, Dead Until Dark , last weekend as part of a personal campaign to understand popular and profitable fiction, and enjoyed it more than we expected. Vampire boning aside, Sookie Stackhouse is no Buffy Summers (she’s a 25 year old virgin — at the beginning, anyway — and spends more time thinking about her clothes than a member of the Baby-sitter’s Club), but she IS telepathic, and can kick some ass when the occasion calls for it. That said, upon seeing Club Dead, we realized that Kindle had made our pleasure possible — there is no way we could have gotten past the super fug cover art on the paperbacks. Preventing judgment by cover is a unsung benefit of e-reading!
More Big Brother Book Clubbing after the jump.
We also saw Bloodshot , another third-in-mystery-series, and this one featuring three distinct cases. Maybe something to do with this being the third month of the year? Author Stuart Macbride’s series revolves around Det. Sgt. Logan Mcrae, who we’re willing to be brings some Philip Marlowe-style smolder to the grim setting of Aberdeen, Scotland.
Glancing over the shoulder of a neighbor on the F train, we found ourselves reading As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, which seems to occupy a weird space all its own in between philosophy and self-help. The dude reading it looked pretty pulled-together, so we’ll assume it works, although he had clearly paid for a book that is readily available for free online. One of the better free versions comes from Black Freighter Productions, a company that publishes books “produced during the time in the writer’s life that was most trying, most joyous, most inspirational, most challenging,” and obviously shares our penchant for Watchmen references. Woot!
We spotted a battered copy of What Is the What – a reader clearly ahead of the curve for “the renaissance of Dave Eggers.” With Away We Go and Where the Wild Things Are both slated to open this year, perhaps Eggers will find a whole new audience, or at least convince the haters he’s not all bad.
Also seen: Heidegger’s Being and Time (in the clutches of a New School student, if our experience is any indication), Bed & Breakfast Ireland 2009 (have a good trip!), something that we think was called The Navy Officer’s Wife (or maybe we just have that title construction on the brain), and Rushdie’s Satanic Verses . Salman Rushdie always reminds us of this incredible Charades coup we pulled off at a party in Red Hook… how would you act out his name?