Popular Fiction

One of the things I like to do is read popular literature. I've come to be a Stephen King fan over the past year. I've read The Stand, Salem's Lot, Different Seasons, Hearts in Atlantis, Thinner, The Regulators, Desperation, Everything's Eventual, and It. I'm currently working on Night Shift. So far, my favorites of the bunch are Thinner and It. I've also recently read Dune by Frank Herbert, Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Sue Grafton's "A" Is For Alibi and "L" Is For Lawless, the Left Behind series, Christopher Paolini's Eragon and Eldest, some of the Series of Unfortunate Events books (I'm about halfway through The Hostile Hospital), Timeline by Michael Crichton, the four-volume Otherland series by Tad Williams, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, and an assortment of science fiction, mystery, and horror short stories and novellas. Stephen King's It was the last book I finished. I had previously seen little snippets of the movie version on TV and even saw the tail-ending. But I forgot that I had seen the ending until I read the end of the book, and then it came back to me. If you've read It, this may sound a bit familiar since memory loss played havoc with the story's characters, too.

I am also an avid Harry Potter reader, though a bit belatedly. In the late 1990's I was becoming increasingly aware of the Potter phenomenon, but it didn't enter my full consciousness until the day in 2000 that the fourth volume The Goblet of Fire was released. I was just making one of my little excursions to the Gainesville Books-a-Million for some flavored coffee and a little browsing. The place was packed solid with people, some of them, adults and children, dressed and made up like Halloween in witch and wizard outfits, complete with flowing robes. The store's employees were all dressed up in the part, too. And there was a long line of people getting their copies of the new book. I remember sitting in the diner area with my coffee and looking over at a woman who appeared to be in her thirties sitting down at the table to my left. She had just gotten her copy and sat there looking at it with adoring, bulging eyes. Then she carefully opened it up and began reading with an expression of total rapture. To be honest, at the time I thought this was pretty creepy, but since then I've come a long way toward reaching her level of appreciation for this delightful series! I've already ordered the final volume that comes out July 21 at midnight and plan to be there at Books-a-Million with the rest of the Potter crowd to pick up my copy.