What I'm reading this weekend
I was telling Wendy about how some people will surprise you. I had a friend who didn't seem very bright but after going to Jack in the Box one day with a group, we started talking about movies and books and he had read Faust by that famous German writer which influenced Marlow and a lot of later writers.
Well, this friend started talking to me about it and I was surprised he had read it. He said, "Oh yea I love reading cool shit like that." Another friend in the same group admitted he doesn't really read and one of my best friends from High school says he only reads the paper because he doesn't have the attention span for anything else. This was proven later on when I lent him my copy of Friday Night Lights and he didn't even bother to read it. How sad!
I used to read a lot more, but there are so many good comics around and books based on comics that I think I have been spoiled. The last good book I read was a thriller called Creepers by David Morrell, the same guy who wrote Rambo First Blood, though I had no idea it was the same dude when I read the book. It was a great read, but I only bought the book because I had a gift card to the college bookstore and it was one of the items I purchased.
There's a big trend in comics now with publishers like Marvel trying to get novelists like Brad Meltzer and even Morrell who penned a recent Captain America mini series. For the most part, these comics I find to be inferior to authors who pen comics on a regular basis like Grant Morrison.
Morrison's recent run on Batman has been excellent for example, so I bought a copy of the latest issue today.
I also plopped $4 on the latest issue of Superman which is more than its regular price but has more pages than the usual standard 22 page comic. Superman has been inferior to recent issues of Action Comics, big blue's other title currently co-written by Richard Donner, albeit rather sporadically. Donner seems to be the exception to the screenwriters and novelists who write comics badly.
Lastly, I bought a fantasy book called Innocent Mage which the guy in the bookstore says is garnering a lot of attention from a British Sci fi publisher called Orbit. I'll let you guys know if it's any good.
