I hope you’ve brought a cup of coffee or something with you today. You might be here for a while. Two more squares off the Reading Bingo card this month: 

A BOOK OF SHORT STORIES:

Sleeping Funny, by Miranda Hill
(Hardcover, 320 pages, Published September 18, 2012, by Doubleday Canada)
4 stars

I know what you’re thinking. You don’t care for short stories, so do you even want to read a blog snippet about them? I was once like you. I didn’t think short fiction collections were “real” books. I used to read them only under duress. But eventually, I found myself actually enjoying one. And so I read another. Then another. And I liked those both very much as well. So, now I don’t hesitate to pick up a book of short fiction – occasionally. (Let’s not get carried away!) You know how sometimes you finish a book, and you want to read something else, but starting a whole new book right at that moment seems a bit daunting? Or when things get really busy and you simply can’t commit either the time or the brainpower to a full-length book? Those are perfect times for short fiction! It’s a little harder to rate these collections, because you will like some stories more than others. But hey, who’s to say you have to read them all? The pieces in Sleeping Funny are mostly four-star, with one or two three-stars and one or two five-star. My favourite is Digging for Thomas, a wartime-on-the-homefront tale.

(In addition to being a writer, and, incidentally, married to author Lawrence Hill of The Book of Negroes fame, Miranda Hill founded and directs what I think is a splendid initiative: Project Bookmark Canada. It celebrates works of CanLit and their imagined scenes set in real places. “Bookmarks” across Canada mark the physical locations where literary scenes occur, and showcase excerpts from those works of fiction or poetry. Next time you are near College St. and Manning Ave., check out the Bookmark for Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces. And I know you’re not surprised to learn that there’s a Bookmark at the Bloor Street Viaduct for Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.)

A BOOK THAT SCARES YOU:

I puzzled over this category. When they say “a book that scares you” do they mean “Boo!” scary (like Frankenstein or vintage Stephen King)? Or do they mean, “now that’s a scary thought” (like, The Singularity or ALS or Social Engineering or Parenthood or The Impending Environmental Catastrophe or They Say Print is Dying or Vladimir Putin or These Are My Choices in the Mayoral Election?)? Or maybe they mean a book that scares you on a literary level, by its heft and complexity and stream-of-consciousness style (damn you, Ulysses). I even pondered cheating on this category, by reading a book on a subject that seems to frighten most reasonable people, but that doesn’t bother me, and then pretending to be scared (for instance, Microwaving Food in Plastic Wrap or Confronting One’s Own Mortality).

But then I was browsing the interwebs one day and came across a book entitled

This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It, by David Wong
(Hardcover, 406 pages, Published October 2, 2012, by St. Martin’s Press)
2.5 stars. Or maybe 3, I dunno.

and I knew it was the book for this square. Now we’re talking pure, phobia-level terror.

Some people, when they see a spider, calmly nab it with a Kleenex and flush it, or (for some inexplicable reason) pick it up and put it outside to carry on its little spider life. I am not one of those people. The insect radar in my brain is constantly on high alert, and I assume that every scuff on the wall or piece of lint on the floor is a spider until proven otherwise. When I do encounter an actual arachnid (or other many-legged creepy-crawly) I scream, run away, cry for help or just cry. In the unfortunate but all-too-frequent situation that there is no one else home at the moment to deal with the intruder, the services of the vacuum cleaner, with its long hose, are enlisted. But sometimes a wily spider positions itself BETWEEN me and the vacuum! This requires me to pass by the spider, making as wide an arc as possible – or doing a running long jump in the case of a narrow hallway – while still keeping tabs on it. My heart pounds and a high-pitched “eeeeeeeeeeeee” emanates from my throat until the spider is safely sucked away.

I didn’t even want to touch the book, because it has spiders on the cover. (They are stylized illustrations and don’t even remotely look like real spiders, but still.) I thought about going the audiobook route on this one, but worried that I would imagine spiders crawling all over my headphones. Luckily I had the bright idea to purchase the hardcover edition, so as to remove the dust jacket while reading.

I started reading without knowing the first thing about this book. Not the premise, or what reviewers thought of it, or even what genre it is. I just plunged right in…

Reading the spider book, day 1: The first couple of pages were actually funny, and I chuckled out loud here and there. I even started to get a little cocky, figuring the book would be a piece of cake. But before too long, protagonist Dave began describing an encounter with a spider (or rather, a spider-like creature). And I abruptly shut the book mid-sentence. After a few minutes I picked it up again, survived reading the rest of the sentence, even laughed out loud a few sentences later, then got to more spider description and had to abort again. I had stupidly chosen this book for my pre-bedtime reading, so I switched to another book for a little while. I didn’t want to invite nightmares by having the spider book be the last thing my brain absorbed before sleeping.

Reading the spider book, day 2: Sat down to read after dinner, to avoid the reading-before-bed problem. Gave myself a pep talk. Opened the book with much trepidation. Peeked through my fingers to read the passage where I’d left off the day before, shutting the book briefly a couple of times. Oh, and I made the “eeeeeeeeeeeee” sound as I read, so hubby came running from the other room to see what was wrong. (By then I was half-squealing and half-giggling at my own ridiculousness, so I was unable to speak but waved him off.) Made it through the offending paragraphs, which turned from “eeeeeeeee” scary to “eeeeeeewwwwwww” gross, then the book returned to a more subdued narrative… for a page and a half. Then, more squealing and another abrupt shut down.

Reading the spider book, day 3: I think the worst might be over. After finally getting through the spider-like-creature-drops-onto-man’s-head-from-out-of-nowhere passage that I couldn’t get through yesterday, I was able to read normally. I even made it to page 92! It helps to think of the creatures as monsters, not spiders. And also that after the first handful of pages the silliness factor jumped off the charts. (Not that the beginning of the book was anything close to realistic, but it’s tough to read about a spider-sized spider that a dude finds in his bed and slightly comical to read about a human-sized monster-spider that carries around turkeys. See the difference?) So far it’s kinda like Outbreak meets Ghostbusters meets The X-Files meets Harold and Kumar (doesn’t matter which movie, just Harold and Kumar doing anything).

Not reading the spider book, day 4: No time to read the spider book today. And I miss it, just a little bit!

Not reading the spider book, day 5: Still no time to read – not even just a few minutes – thanks to an exceptionally heavy work load.

Not reading the spider book, day 6: Now I am VERY grumpy.

Reading the spider book, day 7: Finally, some time to read/sleep. And, the spiders are pretty much gone! Yay! Now it’s just a full-on zombie apocalypse tale.* Which is fine, I do like some post-apocalyptic lit. I’ve just never read anything that’s this, um, farcical.

Reading the spider book, day 8: I’m in the midst of zombies, more zombies, “uninfected” people who are trying to stay that way, overzealous-but-dumb zombie resistance fighters that I suspect aren’t going to survive many more pages, shadowy government agencies, dueling mad scientists/doctors (one good, one evil), two buddies – the heroes of the story – who may or may not have supernatural powers and who may or may not be able to save one buddy’s girlfriend, and one dog with impressive reasoning and language skills. Fun times! There have even been one or two little nuggets of thought on theories of sociology. (Note to self: look for further reading on Dunbar’s number.)

Reading and finishing the spider book, day 9: What the fuck did I just read?!?!

Reflecting on the spider book, day 10: So, this was definitely not my usual literary fare! But that is the whole point of Reading Bingo. The book was amusing enough as it went along and managed to keep my attention once I got through the horror of the spiders in the early pages. I laughed here and there. I actually didn’t like the action around the climax of the story and thought that things went downhill around that point, but then the author redeemed himself in the very last couple of pages. On the rating scale it falls somewhere between “It was OK” and “I liked it.” I’m never going to love a spider-zombie book, but I’m sure there are plenty of readers out there who will. At least I wasn’t disappointed with it, having gone in with zero expectations.

(Is it weird that I just wrote three pages on a book that I barely liked and am not recommending, but I usually just write a line or two on the books that I love? I suppose not – for this square I wanted to share with you more about my experience of reading a scary book than the book itself.  As for the books I love, the less said the better so you can discover them fully for yourself.)

*Well, they’re technically not zombies, and my referring to them as such would normally probably drive David Wong crazy, but I think he’d rule it acceptable for the purposes of blurbing the book where detailed background info is not provided.

 

Current to-read-pile count: 27. This month I read more books than I acquired! It’s a minor miracle. (A very minor miracle – it was a difference of two, but I’ll take it. Let’s focus on the small victories, people!)