I spotted Joseph while I was looking for a seat and decided to plop down in front of him. He was on his way home from working a little overtime at a phone answering service (if I understood him correctly he answers phone calls for celebrities or patches them through. He spoke to Al Pacino that day!). He's reading Dean Koontz's Odd Hours which just came out a few days earlier. He always buys books by his favourite authors when they come out with new ones. Dean Koontz is definitely one of his favourite authors. Others he loves? Clive Cussler, Lee Child, and, of course, Stephen King. He's been a fan of these authors since they came on to the scene - he thinks 20 years or so!
He is only a handful of pages into Odd Hours but is enjoying it so far. It's about this man (a recurring character in many of Koontz's books) who has these premonitions and uses this gift to stop natural disasters (and the like) from happening.
Out of all the authors he named I gathered that his top guy is Clive Cussler, just by the way he spoke about him. Joseph explains that Clive Cussler books are about protagonists similar to Indiana Jones and James Bond - worldly travellin' treasure hunters and the sort! He's read books where he co-authors with someone else and Joseph can sense a difference in the tone and is thusly turned off by it.
And how about these books turned into movies? Not a big fan of them either. He attended one of Cussler's book-turned-movie screening where Cussler was there doing a Q&A. Joseph told me that Cussler expressed to the crowd that adapting your book into a movie is "like selling your child to prostitution". When Joseph watches Stephen King movies he feels that the movies make the stories more complicated than they really are. "Stephen King books are simple and I like that about them." Same goes for the works of his other fave writers. But there are some exceptions like with The Exorcist and The Godfather, both books he read before there was even a movie and he feels that the movies did the books justice. "They were both right on the mark."
Ok, so yes, these authors like Cussler, King, and Koontz and their books are what my lit profs called "grocery checkout novels" but Joseph says you shouldn't knock 'em! Yes, they are easy to get into, and that is why he reads them on the bus to pass the time, but he defends his book choices and rightfully so! He asked me what I was reading and I whipped out Franny and Zooey from my bag. "See, I know people who say the books I read are silly and that I should read books like that. But people should read what they want to read because at least they are reading!" He starts to tell me how in school he hated how they forced you to read only certain books. He also hated it when teachers asked you to read aloud because there were students who just had difficulty with reading and it was unfortunate! We both agreed that people should read whatever they want, as long as they are reading! Books shouldn't intimidate you!
Joseph had a story about how he left one of his books at his brother-in-law's, who ended up reading it. Not really big into reading (and giving Joe a hard time for reading it), it was a wonderful surprise to see that he actually enjoyed the book Joseph left behind. "My brother-in-law told me that it was a great feeling because he felt smart, that the idea of reading always made him feel inferior most of his life."
The topic of audio books came up and he admits that he isn't really a big fan but he did listen to Matt Dillon's reading of On The Road by Jack Kerouac and enjoyed it. He thinks being a fan of Matt Dillon made it worth his while, too.
If he could write a book of his own? This was a tough one but it would be a book based on political topics going on in the present-day. A political-thriller, if you will, about how high gas prices don't really have anything to do with the war in Iraq but some other reason...
Joseph also recommends the book Shardik by Richard Adams.
Do you have any 'guilty pleasure' books that have a certain stigma but you still read 'em and love 'em anyway?
1 comments:
I read Odd Hours last Saturday. I love the series. Guilty pleasure? Not on your life. I treasure books like this because you keep going back to the same characters and they become old friends. Koontz is the master of good vs evil and sometimes you need a "white hat".
Post a Comment