Often read light reads

Booking Through Thursday posed a question a couple of weeks ago that I want to touch on. Specifically, what books does a person pull off a shelf when they need comfort or a pick-me-up? Last week, the question was similar. What books would one read when life is grand?

I don’t really think in those terms. I would go back to the same books under both circumstances. I have on my shelves a number of light reads that I like. I go back to them time and again. They are easy and enjoyable. They are good without being too serious (some light reads have a more serious tone, but these don’t have that). One of the things I think is very important to reading many books is to intersperse light reading with heavier works. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so to speak.

Mike Resnick’s Santiago. In this myth of the far future, Santiago is viewed by the Democracy (the far-flung space-faring empire of man) as a criminal, but as Robin Hood by the denizens of the Inner Frontier. The book follows a number of people as they search out Santiago, each for their own reasons. While the description is melodramatic, the prose is light-hearted and contains much humor.

Jerry Jay Carroll’s Top Dog. This one sits in the fantasy genre. It doesn’t go so far over the edge of humor as Tom Holt or Terry Pratchett. Less slapstick, and more subtle poking fun at the genre of fantasy, while still staying well within its bounds.

Carl Hiaasen’s Strip Tease. Almost all of Hiaasen’s novels fall into this category for me. I’ve replaced several mass market paperbacks when my copies wore out. I’m buying more hard covers and trade paperbacks these days so this won’t happen as much. Strip Tease follows the attempts of a stripper to get ahead in the madcap world of Hiaasen’s South Florida. Hiaasen usually starts off with seemingly semi-normal people and situations, then slowly makes them more and more absurd until the end when they are as zany as anything in a Terry Pratchett novel.

Gary Larson’s The PreHistory of The Far Side. Not exactly reading, so it’s even lighter than light. Perhaps sometimes soon I’ll post a good rant about how consuming graphics novels doesn’t really qualify as reading, and I’ll piss off the comics lovers like I did the fantasy lovers. The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were the only reasons I read the funny pages at all during my college years in the early 1990s. The newspapers are full of crap like Hagar the Horrible and Garfield, which just aren’t funny. Larson appealed to my sense of humor. I rarely laugh out loud. I find amusement in the absurd. And if cows (The Far Side’s premier animal) aren’t absurd, I don’t know what it.

John Christopher’s The White Mountains. What list of these light reads would be complete without a couple of young adult novels. I don’t mean to push young adult stuff below consideration as serious literature. Quite the opposite in fact. Authors writing young adult literature rarely try to make their work as obtuse as some high-falutin’ Great American Novelists. Consequently, I think they hit the mark of greatness much more solidly. Christopher’s Tripods series takes place after aliens have conquered the Earth. Several young teens learn the secret of the metal mesh caps that the aliens use to enslave mankind. Outfitted with counterfeits, they wage their own war on the aliens.

Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three. While Alexander does use some of the clichés that irritate me so much now, I read his Chronicles of Prydain series long before I was inundated with so much Tolkien derivative fantasy. I still like his works. Taran wishes to be much more than the pig-keeper he is. Though young, he embroils himself in multiple adventures seeking his way in the world. I like them because, although Taran is destined to become king of Prydain, he does so less by fulfilling any prophecy than by growing up and becoming a man. And perhaps Princess Eilonwy was my first literary crush. She’s strong-willed, smart, and less in need of male protection than Taran would have it. To me, she is an icon of what a female character in literature could be.

And to piss people off, particularly an alternate version of myself, I’m going to include here my all time favorite light watch, Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. My first editorial content not related to reading, and probably the last for some time. I’m going to hate myself in the morning for broadening the focus of Rat’s Reading beyond reading, even just a little bit. Luckily, the walk of shame is short. RoboCop is part man, part machine, and all cop. He fights crime in a dystopian future old Detroit where a decadent society thinks nothing of putting a man’s death on television for ratings. In some ways over the top, and in others still extremely subtle in it’s criticism of where culture is headed, it does everything with humor and action-hero wisecracking.

As always with the editorial content, this is all about feedback. What are the light reads you go back to often? Given my curmudgeon-in-waiting status, what am I missing in my list?