Return From The Reading Slump

For whoever is reading this: sorry I haven't posted in so long! Allow me to apologize using this hilarious SNL clip:

I don't know what season this was from but it just keeps cracking me up! Vegetarian chili and guacamolito sauce, my god! How do they come up with this stuff?

But yeah, I've been in a sort of reading slump. It's been partly because of school restarting (which means having that homework load) and partly because of swim season starting, yay!!! I now have my daily dose of chlorine perfume and my arms are aching from churning the water ALL READY and it's only been a week. This season is even more special because two of my best friends, Adrie and Thomas, joined too. WE'RE ALL ON JV TOGETHER! Which means we spend that much more time together being reckless teenagers!

And even though I feel so much better seeing my friends daily at the personal hell known as school and I'm SO much happier back in my swimming groove, I just haven't been able to read lately because the book I was reading (and thankfully just finished) was SOOOOOO LOOOOOONG.

Enter Stephen King's Wizard and Glass, the 4th installment in the Dark Tower series out of 7. Isn't that depressing? I'm only halfway done.

Don't get me wrong, I love this series. It's just that this particular book seemed to be really DENSE. It started off well, returning to Roland the gunslinger, his friends Eddie from New York, Susannah, and Jake the kid, plus their talking weasel-dog thing, Oy. They were trapped on a moody monorail that they had to outriddle (I know, how does King come up with these things?).

But then it turns out half the book is a return to Roland's past to detail how he started his quest for the tower from the ashes of his first love, which sounds breathtaking but a lot of it just got to be too much for me to follow. It just got a bit depressing!

Fortunately the book picked up again with a good ending even though it was a bit bland. There are also some tie-ins to The Wizard of Oz which I thought was REALLY cool; I love when authors use allusions as allegories, if that makes sense.

I also just borrowed a book from Adrie since we just had this huge killer sleepover with TONS OF SUGAR! It's called, I Am Neurotic by Lianna Kong.

And boy is it hilarious.

It's a collection of confessions, basically; confessions of random people who have odd idiosyncracies and weird habits that make them neurotic. The funny part is as you're reading this book, you find yourself thinking, HOLY CRAP I DO THAT!!! Like the dude who liked his toilet paper to roll from the top. I SO have that problem, only I don't obsess about it like he does.

Then there are the ones you read and you go, How do they live? There are people who have to have twelve chocolate chips in each cookie, people who punch shower curtains to make sure there's nobody hiding in the shower waiting to get them, even people who can only eat the middle of foods... like sandwiches, for instance.

So this book was entertaining (and a quick read, took me less than an hour) and I recommend buying it... or hiding out in your local bookstore and just reading it there.

Well, time to go get out a new book to celebrate the full recovery from my reader's slump. Maybe I'll read outside... then I must pack my swim bag for a double practice day tomorrow. Yay, right? If this keeps up, I may not be posting as often as I have been for the past month, but I'll try REALLY hard. Promise.