It's called multi-tasking!

So, apparently there is a phenomenon sweeping the nation (and by "nation", I mean a small group of my friends). That phenomenon? A hair-drying book! Yes, you read that right. It's a book you read specifically when you're drying your hair. Or, as in the case of my wildly talented friend The Hot Mess Housewife, you have a flat-ironing book (and seriously, check out her Hot Mess blog. If you are interested in sewing, yelling at small children and general wittiness, you'll love her!) For me, I can't read my challenge books that early in the morning. Usually they're a little on the heavier side... which does just not jive with a caffeine-less Bear Allen. And let's face it, if I started my day reading Sylvia Plath, I'd be joining her in front of that avocado green Kenmore... telling her to make some room for my fat head. So I tend to pick something lighter and a little more modern for when I'm sitting on my toilet with my head upside down for fifteen minutes. I decided that I'm going to start sharing what my current "hair-drying books" are. I always love to hear what people are reading and figured you might want to hear the same. This will become a regular feature on The BW&R. Hopefully I'll be able to add a few good books to your "to be read" list. I recently finished a re-read of Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. Ms. Niffenegger is the author of The Time Traveler's Wife (which I also thoroughly enjoyed). As it was a re-read, you can safely assume that I would recommend this book. I read it again simply because I didn't have anything new downloaded to Aldeux... but I'm glad I did!

From Amazon: Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls’ aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie. The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt.

Right now, I'm reading a book by my favorite author, Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) titled The Running Man. If you know about my propensity for dystopian literature, you'll see that I'm enjoying my very first experience with King's pseudonym.

From Amazon:

A bit of a departure from the supernatural horror that is most frequently associated with his work, the novel describes a science fiction dystopia where market capitalism and television game shows have spiraled out of control, and the separation between the haves and the have-nots has been formalized with separate currencies. King establishes characters quickly, creating sympathy in the first few pages for Ben Richards--whose 18-month-old baby girl is suffering from a horrible cough, perhaps pneumonia. Not able to afford medicine, Richards enters himself in the last-chance money-making scheme of the Free-Vee games. The games include Treadmill to Bucks, in which heart-attack prone contestants struggle to outlast a progressively demanding treadmill, or the accurately named Swim the Crocodiles. After a rigorous battery of physical and mental examinations, Richards is assigned "Elevator Six"--the path of a chosen few--that leads to The Running Man game. In this game, the stakes and the prizes are raised. Success means a life of luxury. Failure means death. Unfortunately, few ever win the game; in fact, as the producer tells Richards, in six years no one has survived.

So... let's have it. What are you currently reading?

#stephenking #therunningman #audreyniffenegger #herfearfulsymmetry #deepthoughtsfromdamptresses