By Guest Blogger yarn boy
If you’ve been a regular visitor to yarn boy, then you know that I haven’t been blogging much lately. Some of this is because I don’t have all that much to say about knitting at the moment, but now our dear friend WG has given me the opportunity to blog about one of my favorite non-knitting subjects: books! Today I’d like to tell you about my favorite unsung genre, Literary Crack.
You won’t find a Literary Crack (LC) section at your local Barnes & Noble. If they did have an LC section, no one would ever browse any of the other sections. LC books are safely distributed throughout the entire bookstore, so regular users can safely masquerade as fans of fiction, horror, or whatever genre we tell ourselves we’re really reading.
What distinguishes a work of LC from other books is that it doesn’t have a plot. What it has instead is a vacuum cleaner that turns on the moment you open the cover and sucks you—and anything else you were planning on doing with your day—right through every page, all the way to the back cover. If you’ve ever opened up a book with the intention of reading, you know, just a paragraph or two before going to sleep, only to realize that the sun has somehow been up for hours, everyone in the house has left for work, and you’ve forgone basic life functions like, say, using the bathroom . . . well, you, my friend, have been the victim of Literary Crack.
But don’t worry! Admitting that you’re an LC addict is the first step! The second step is to find out what other LC addicts are reading. I am going to help you along with a few favorites from my LC stash.
WG has already fallen prey to blogged about this book, and I second everything he says. What makes this book “literary” and not just plain old “crack” is that Max Bloom has expended some energy figuring out what his characters sound like, what they look like, how they talk, what their daily lives contain. At the same time Mr. Bloom clearly thinks about zombies in the same manner that your average person thinks about sex. Where you or I would say, “Hmmm . . . I wonder what it would be like to get it on in every room in my house,” Bloom says, “Hmmm . . . I wonder what it would be like if there were zombies in every room in my house.” If the DSM-IV doesn’t have a category for zombie obsession, it should. But thank goodness for the obsession, because it produced World War Z, which is one hell of an LC hit.
I suppose it’s debatable whether the word “literary” belongs anywhere near this book. It’s got a few problems, not the least of which is that it doesn’t have any ruins in it. (The movie, on the other hand, does. It’s a bad sign when Hollywood outthinks you.) What it does have, though, is one of the creepiest, most unusual “monsters” to hit the horror shelves in a long time. This book actually made me stay bed on a sunny Saturday morning just so I could finish it before lunch. I am not an especially fast reader, but I was done with The Ruins in a 48-hour period that also included required activities as going to work, breathing, and eating. It did not include sleeping.
(to be continued...)
Wednesday, my first full day back in the USA, I felt pretty normal. A little more tired than normal in the early evening, but otherwise no real complaints.
