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Sunday, April 02, 2006

Death

I've been (rather inadvertantly) reading quite a few books about death these days. I finished Stephen King's Cell a while back (his take on the zombie genre) and quite unwittingly followed it up with Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man -- although actually it's the fact that Reaper Man is a de facto zombie book as well, but more about that later. And finally, as if on cue, I run across Christopher Moore's latest novel A Dirty Job at Borders this weekend when we were out looking for the new Jennifer Crusie novel Don't Look Down (hits stores April 4th but Heidi's been hearing that it's been available early in some places.)

In A Dirty Job, a nice Beta-male finds out that he's basically, well, Death. With a capital D.

I've only read one of Moore's novels -- and that was The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. I mean, how could I refuse it? It was Christmas AND zombies!!! And it was a really good book, even though it got off to a slow start, it ended up being well worth the read. I've never gotten around to reading Lamb, but it's on my to-be-read pile.

The unfortunate thing is that I'm having to resort to the library in order to read A Dirty Job, which means there are 7 people in front of me waiting to read it. I guess as soon as I'm done with Reaper Man (and what a hoot it is!) I'm going to read that James Frey's A Million Little Pieces just to see what all the commotion is about. Someone at work loaned it to me so it's not like I went out and bought it or anything.

2 comments:

Brian said...

I have to admit, Reaper Man may have been the last Pratchett that I read. That has to have been several years ago, so maybe I'm in the mood for him again. I think I was spoiled by Small Gods and I kept waiting for him to reach that level of quality again. RM and other of the Discworld books where the target just seemed to easy really just got under my skin. And I hated his endings ...

I want to try Moore sometime, and I've got the Crusie/Mayer waiting for me at the library. Maybe I can consume it this weekend.

Anonymous said...

Hey, Dan!
One week until it is you, me, and Madge on the Vegas strip. Let's hope there are no Targets in sight! Maybe the tour will start on time this year. Have you managed to read the Dirty Job, yet? Are you still waiting for the libraray to come through? Just curoius. Sounds like an interesting and entertaining author.