Diversionary Tactics

I've been remiss in keeping my posts updated - it's been almost a month since I wrote anything...but I have a good, er, excuse. A couple of good ones, in fact.

First, I rediscovered fiction! And in a big way. I think law school and the legal profession snuffed out my passion for reading all things wild and wonderful, where for a few glorious hours I got to suspend disbelief (wait a minute, what am I talking about - some of the cases we had to read, heck, some of those I actually defended, bordered on the improbable). Anyway, somewhere along the line I stored all my fiction titles away - the murder mysteries, the trashy techno-thrillers, the heart-wrenching tales of life and love - and replaced them all with travel accounts, biographies, useful legal analyses of the system, metapyhsical treatises, inspirational books of faith and the Church, and (eek) business volumes.

How much fun was that?

And then, something happened. My Dad recently came home from the US with a couple of James Rollins books, which I ignored for a while. But curiousity got the better of me, and so I started to read, and read, and read... until I found that I couldn't stop. For the better part of a week I began to desperately binge on reading fiction like my life depended on it - I couldn't get enough. Rollins, Steve Alten, Javier Sierra, Raymond Khoury, Sam Bourne, Thomas Gifford, John Case, Dan Brown...and a little Mitch Albom for dessert (I went through one his books in a little more than an hour, while waiting to meet up with a friend). At the end of it all, I managed to read no less than 15 books in 7 days - pretty much a personal record of sorts. One of the best parts of it was that I got to read most everything for free, thanks to those online e-book exchange forums.

I'm still going through at most one book a day, but I think the "worst" is over. I've apparently satisfied an unconscious urge I'd been suppressing for a decade or so, and it looks like it's levelled off - for the meantime, at least (I'm presently downloading a few more titles discriminately picked out from a huge 2,000++ collection).

Ah, reading. The best diversion, ever (especially since I've not had any television for the last several months). Pass me that David Morrell, if you please.

Oh, and before I forget - I have a second excuse: I just celebrated another birthday among friends and family, so I was in the thick of preparations for that over the last few days (the annual party - the count was at least 70 people who came this year, a relatively small-ish crowd as a bunch of people didn't make it last Saturday - is my little way of thanking everyone for who they are in my life). While that was an awesome experience, I didn't get a single book as a birthday present. Oh well :-)