New Book - Duma Key by Stephen King

I just finished Duma Key, by Stephen King, and I loved it (I know, I'm supposed to be reading Stormfire, but I couldn't resist).

Let me say first that I love how King's eases you into the story, giving a perfectly normal background, and then introducing slowly the supernatural and horrific features. It almost takes you by surprise, when the horror springs from the pages, but King always delivers.

The story is as follows: Edgar Freemantle's life - as he knew it - ended with a terrible crane accident. The former wealthy constructor survives to find himself minus one arm, with a hurt leg, and what's worse, a hurt head that won't remember the simplest words and tends to black rages when the frustration is too high. Soon he finds himself wifeless too.

Edgar's contemplating suicide when his therapist recommends a geographical change and to resume his former hobby: drawing.

Not very convinced, Edgar finds himself in Duma Key, one of the Florida Keys. In the solitude of the island he slowly recovers his health, and makes friends with the only year-round inhabitants of the place: an elderly lady called Elizabeth, who is fighting Alzheimer, and her companion, the quick tongued Wireman. Edgar starts drawing, and he discovers he's quite good at it. More than good, actually.

And what's more strange, when he is drawing he actually feels his missing arm, and the maddening itch at his ghost limb dissapears. He can also sense things when he's drawing. And he can change things, too.

This way he learns of his ex-wife affair with a former friend, and the friend's suicidal thoughts. When a famous rapist and murdered is in danger of being set loose, he paints him without a nose and mouth and the man dies. And he helps his friend Wireman, who has a bullet in his brain that's slowly making him blind and could die, to get better.

But Edgar's gift comes with something else attached. Something that's evil and that's slowly testing Edgar. Something that impregnates the pictures he has made, and can control people.

Something that began with the baby girl Elizabeth, when she hit her head and had to draw herself into the world.

Something that had been sleeping for a long time but now has awakened... and Perse doesn't like to be challenged. Her ship of death is waiting for Edgar, and if he doesn't want to come, well, then he's going to be punished in the worst way possible... in the person that's dearest to his heart...

Edgar decided to confront Perse and put her back to sleep, with the help of his friend Wireman and his hired man-for-all, Jack Cantori. But as he goes deeper into Duma Key, and the night is quickly approaching, his final battle with Perse is going to be more complicated than he imagined...

As I said, I liked this book. I think part of it was based on King's own car accident - he recovered in Florida - and I guess some of Ed's thoughts and fears about his accident came from King's experience.

The scary twins - Tessie and Lo-Lo - reminded me of "The Shining" (the movie) and the creepy twins that were after Danny (his girlfriends, as a friend said).

And the final battle with Perse at the bottom of the tunnel had something of the last stand in "It".

If you didn't know it yet, I'm a huge Stephen King's fan. One of his Constant Readers, I guess.

Now I'm scared of rag dolls too.

By the way, my husband played in his guitar "Mr. Sandman" by Chet Atkins while I was reading this book, and now it gives me the creeps. I find it strangely adequate... a beach song for a horror book set in the Florida Keys. The sea, the beach, and the ship of the dead.

Visiting the family

I haven't even started Stormfire yet. This week I'm staying with my mom, and between the meals and playing with my nephews, I haven't had much time.

However, I managed to finish this book I found in her house: "Con el Coco en el Divan", by Pilar Sordo and Coco Legrand. I'm sad to say it was a disapointment.

I was expecting a dialogue, a conversation between the psicologist and the humorist. Instead, after one page at the beginning of each chapter written by Coco Legrand, the psicologist wrote all her thoughts on the matter at hand, which for at least 80% of the book was the raising of children. Being childless myself, it wasn't so interesting, specially since she ranted against the TV, playstation, etc, and spending all the time in the bedrooms.

As the saying goes, nothing new under the sun.

Confessions of a Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella

I just finished this book. It's a chick lit novel, published in 2001, and it's one of my favorite books.

Rebecca Bloomwood is a trendy 25 year old journalist, who has a boring job in a financial paper, lives in fabulous Fulham with her best friend Suze, and is absolutely addicted to shopping. The problem is, she has a huge overdraft and has been receiving threatening letters from her bank, her credit card, and every shop where she used to have credit.

Becky is overwhelmed by her debts, but when the panic starts to suffocate her, there's only one way to feel a bit better... to buy herself a little something.

Becky really tries to solve her money problem, but every plan backfires. Among the craziests and most delusional ideas - like having her VISA bill paid by someone else by mistake, win the lottery, and marry the 15th richest man of Great Britain - she tries to follow his dad advice: Cut Back or Make More Money.

Cut Back doesn't agree with her. She actually spends more money trying to eat at home - for which she had to buy all the cooking paraphernalia - and going to the museum - where she pays a whole season ticket and ends up buying her Christmas presents in March - than what she is able to save. And besides, she is in physical pain. She needs to go to a shop. The smell, the thrill of something new, the pleasure of buying something, is too much for her.

So it's Make More Money. But how can you get more money if you work in a little paper called Sucessful Savings, and your boss doesn't give you a raise?

Maybe you should get another job. That's what Becky tries to do, but she blows her opportunity up when she pretends she is fluent in finnish and is caught in the interview. Or you could get a part time job... and Becky is in heaven when she is hired part time as a clothes store assistant. How difficult can it be to help other people buy? But hiding the last pair of zebra printed jeans is not part of the job, and it actually can get you sacked. Even trying to make upholstered frames for sale doesn't work out, and it's Suze, Becky's longtime friend, who discovers a knack for making amazing looking frames.

Her life reaches its nadir when, after blowing her date with the millionare, Becky tries to buy half a store only to have all her credit cards rejected at the cashier. In front of a lot of people.

Deeply embarrased, Becky has only one place to go and lick her wounds. Her parents home.

Comforted by mom and dad - who at first think she's having a baby, and then that her bank manager is stalking her - Becky has an opportunity to relax. Only that she discovers that, because of a passing "advice" she gave her neighbors, they were cheated out of L 20.000.

Feeling incredible guilty over it, she investigates and writes a story that is accepted in a famous newspaper. Suddenly, Becky is famous, and she's even invited to a morning talk show. ¡She's going to be in national television!

Everything is like a dream, until she finds out she's going to do a "lively debate" with the PR representatives of the cheaters. Which means, she's going to debate with gorgeus and extremely intelligent Luke Brandon. Oh. My. God. Maybe that's a good moment to run away and hide under the bed.

Luke Brandon is the six foot tall, dark haired and dark eyed, extremely handsome CEO of Brandon Communications, a PR business that usually represents finantial institutions. He has run into Becky one time to many, and unlike other people who think she's an airhead, he admires her imagination. And her looks. And he doesn't think she's dumb at all.

The problem is that they had some sort of impasse, when Becky helped him shop luggage and found out later that it was for his girlfriend (and he had been sort of flirting with her). They parted in bad terms and hadn't spoken since. And now they're going to be together - but taking opposing stands - in television!

Luckily, Becky has the "moral justice" on her side, and she does a good job defending her neighbors interests. Actually, she's so clear and easy to understand that she's offered a permanent possition as a financial advisor in the program.

With all the extra money, her problems are solved. And there's Luke, and a romantic night at the Ritz...

I really like Becky. She has a crazy imagination, and a good heart, and a lot of her antics had me LOL. Sometimes I cringed too, mortified by the situations she found herself in.

I didn't like the movie at all. The protagonist was a shopaholic schizo whose only common ground with Becky were her name and an absolute lack of self control the moment she stepped into a store. The things that happen to her are different from the ones in the book, or end different. Mom and Dad weren't anything like Becky's real parents (I found it hilarious that Becky's mom was a catalogue shopaholic). And the movie Luke Brandon was a watered down version of the original. Come on, the real Luke is a shark who made a succesful business from scratch. Even Becky is a little intimidated by him before she gets to know him better.

I think the part of the movie I disliked the most was the ending, when she pays her debt in pennies. I found it a mean-spirited thing to do, completely out of character of the book-Becky. And in the book, she ends up in good terms with her bank manager.

Movie trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5muyAz5DYM

¿Is this anything like the book?


I have to admit at first I didn't get Becky's passion for shopping. But after living in NY, where there are amazingly beautiful stuff in every store you go, I undertand how difficult is to be restrained.

My road to romance (novels)

Even though I know I don't need to apologize for my literary tastes, it's difficult not to do so when one's about to speak about romance novels. I think every despective word has been directed at them, even by people who - shall I say this? - don't read at all.

But somehow, to read a story about 2 people who fall in love is tacky. Never mind that some of the greatest books or plays are about that (Does Romeo & Juliet, or Gone w/ the Wind ring a bell?). If the main characters don't die or become separated at the end, it's trash.

Later I will probably rant about the possible causes of this contempt. For now, I'm merely going to list the reasons why I'm grateful romance novels exists:

1. I learned english because of them

2. They relax me after a stressful day, and have helped me pull through some difficult times

3. They sparked my interest in other genres

4. Last but not least, they have given me many enjoyable hours.

For me, it all began with Gone with the Wind. When I was 11 or 12 years old, I found a cheap copy in the attic. The book had been published by a magazine in a two-volume cheap paperback, with tiny letters and yellow paper. I had the bad luck of running into the second volume (which started with Scarlett's taxes problem), and even though I turned the attic upside down, I couldn't find the first part.

It didn't matter. I was completely hooked from the first sentence. I wanted to be Scarlett.

That summer I visited my paternal grandparents and found in their house the coveted first part of the novel. Needless to say, they never saw it again.

One year or so after that, the much awaited sequel was released. Even though it was by a different author, I yearned to read it. Finally, Scarlett and Rhett together...

At that time, I was going to get braces, and I had a couple of teeth pulled out. On our way back from the dentist, mom stopped at a bookstore to buy me a little prize.

My heart almost stopped when I saw a copy of Scarlett, a huge hardback with a glossy cover. The problem was that it was way too expensive, and mom couldn't afford it.

Never one to lose a customer, the saleslady recommended another book for me.

It was this one:

And I swear to God that this was the cover.

And mom bought it.

I was a little dissapointed I didn't get Scarlett, but any book is better than no book, and it looked promising. So I got into bed, my mouth full of cotton, and started to read.

The beginning was intriguing. There was this young woman, sneaking in the dead of the night into a prison to get married to a man condemned to death. She didn't even knew the guy, just wanted to be a widow so her father would stop nagging her to get married. But what happens then? The bridegroom is bought by her father's evil foreman as a bonding servant, and is sent to a tropical island, where the fake widow lives.

I had to admit that the endless descriptions of the island and the work the guy had to do bored me a little, so I skipped a lot. Actually, I even skipped their first lovemaking scene in the island, it was so lost among the descriptions of the trees and buildings. When I was halfway through the book, it suddenly picked up speed. Shanna, our heroine, has her "husband" kidnapped by pirates to get rid of him (yes, she was a really sweet girl). The problem is that the same pirates stormed the island and took her prisoner too.

And then's when the adventure truly begins. They have to work together to escape the nasty pirates, steal a ship, and go back to the island. It was like a Blyton's adventure, but with a lot more spice.

Even though I liked the book, at that point I wasn't really hooked into romance novels. All this endless descriptions were a huge drawback for me. Boring, boring, boring.

So I was a bit surprised by myself when, the next time I went to the bookstore, I was torn between a Blyton novel and a romance novel. But they sounded so exciting. There were knights, and feuds, and cream recipes you were warned not to make at home, as if they were poisonous or would explode.

Finally, this was what I picked:

As anyone who has ever read Jude Deveraux knows, her descriptions are short, the dialogues are funny, and at least this book is adventure after adventure. It's a real Road Cabin novel, where the main characters have to flee through England to Scotland and back being chased by relatives, and end up as prisoners in a castle in France.

This is also the last book of the Velvet Quartet, aka The Montgomery Annals, and after reading it I absolutely had to read the stories of the other 3 brothers.

Shortly after that, I came across Johanna Lindsey's Secret Fire and I was completely and utterly lost. Who wouldn't be after reading a Cinderella tale set in XIX century Russia?

By the way, I got Scarlett as a Christmas present, but was very dissapointed by it. In retrospective, I'm very glad mom bought me Shanna that day. It opened the door to a new genre that I've enjoyed ever since.

A little bit about me, or how I became a voracious reader

Somewhere, I read that Lisa Kleypas wakes up at 4 AM so she could write before making her children ready for school and doing the housework. I couldn't believe someone was willing to leave her bed at that hour, but here I am, at 5 AM, after Hubbie left on a trip, and happily typing away. I guess that when you have a project that interests you, the time doesn't really matter (or when you have a real bad case of insomnia).

I was thinking about how sometimes Hubbie and I discuss what makes a child a reader - or, more precisely, how are we going to turn our future offspring into readers - and even though we still don't have an answer, I think the conditions that turned me into a reader are pretty reasonable.

They were:

1. My mom's example.

2. Having a lot of books available in my home, which were entertaining and readable.

3. Being forced to spend excruciatingly long periods of time without anything to do, and thus being bored to death.

1. My mom's example

I've always thought little kids are like little monkeys. I don't think that's an insult, only that children are closer to our primate ancestors. After all, they like to swing from things, and climb trees, and copy what their parent's are doing (until they hit adolescence, when they start doing the opposite).

I remember sitting next to my mom, she reading her book and I reading mine (and without understanding a word of it... I think I grabbed one of her Patricia Highsmith's novels). But I was doing the same thing as mommy, and I remember I felt so happy and comforted... Sadly, she went through a reader's block shortly after that and didn't read a book for years, until I lend her my copy of Open Season, by Linda Howard.

2. Having readable books lying around.

When I was little, we lived in a house with a spare room in the back. It was called "the guest room" but I don't remember any guest ever staying there. Mostly it was used as one of my sisters's atelier, where she kept her canvases and paintings. It also had a wall to wall bookcase.

Of course my parents provided me with suitable books for my age, but in this Aladdin's cave I found such jewels as Jacqueline Susann's The Valley of the Dolls, Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, and a collection of severely chopped masterpieces of literature, among them a less-than-100-pages Jane Eyre, complete with watercolor pictures. There was also a sugary sweet collection of novellas about Sissi, the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, full with daring adventures and romance.

After I became the official bookworm of the family, my sisters sometimes lent me their books in secret - like Zana Muhsen's Sold, and Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel. My parents encouraged my addiction and used to buy me books, but it looked like they chose them as if they were going to read them. That's the only reason that explains that I received a book about Queen Isabella of Spain and a book about brazilian prostitutes when I was 10 years old - later my dad had second thoughts and took away the book about the brazilian girls, but I had already read it. And what's even funnier, some six months later we were shopping in the mall when he saw the same book in a bookstore and offered to buy it for me! He completely forgot he had taken it away before. I guess it had a really catchy title and there was nothing in the blurb about the p's.

The recollection about my childhood's readings wouldn't be complete without writing about the prolific Enid Blyton. This english teacher wrote about 100 children's books, about adventures, mysteries, schools, farms, you name it.

The first Blyton's book I read was a mystery about a dissappearing cat, which my mom bought me. Later, I was delighted to discover my school library had a selection of her books, as well as The Lone Tree Series, by Malcolm Saville. While I was reading them, they put them away in a small storing room adjacent to the library (the library was on the top floor of a very old house, and this storing room was like a small attic). Luckily the librarian knew me well - yeah, that's a surprise - and she allowed me to keep borrowing them. It's a shame they're hidden now. The were a lot of fun.

3. Being bored to tears.

I think the crucial turnpoint was being forced to spend long periods of time when my only - or funnier - distraction were books.

I'm not speaking about being locked in a room with only a book for a couple of hours, by the way.

Until I was well into my teens, whe used to travel every single weekend to my grandma's house. Grandma lived in another city, and it took about 2 hours to get to her house. And back. Sometimes longer, if it was a long weekend. 4 hours with nothing to do except to look at the scenery. And let's get real, when you're a child, you don't give a darn about it.

But the worst was that, after arriving at her house and having an italian style lunch, everybody went to sleep the siesta. Even the cat.

And for two more hours - until my grandpa woke up and went for a smoke - you couldn't make a peep.

Watch the TV? All the TV's were in the bedrooms, where the sleeping beautys rested. The cat was safe sleeping with my grandma. My sisters would claim they had to study and dissapeared with their boyfriends. And I was too young to be allowed to leave the house alone.

It was hell. I would roam through the house in tiptoe, trying to find something to play with, and later something to read.

The other problem was that all the books from that house had vanished. The only books I could ever find were an Agatha Christie's mystery and a history book belonging to my grandpa. And I really searched.

To find a magazine was like hitting the jackpot.

After a while I learned to bring a book with me. I would read it so many times during the weekends that later I could recite parts of it. It became a trick I was sometimes asked to perform by my mom, when we were returning home on Sunday and it was too dark to read in the car (my mom didn't let me use a booklamp because she was worried I'd hurt my eyesight). Other times, I would chew on my book until it looked as if a little mouse had been nibbling at the dog edges (I guess I might have been hungry. Or bored. Or maybe the book was like a pacifier).

As I grew older, the trips to grandma's house became a treat, and not only for the italian cooking and the teatime pastries. As she lived in a smaller and safer city than I did, I could walk to the downtown, or go to the pier or the beach. Of course, by that time I was a complete bookworm, and I waited eagerly for the moment when everybody would go to sleep. Then, I would be free to walk the 20 blocks to the downtown, eat an ice cream and hunt for books to my heart's content.

First Post

I'm so excited about this. This is the first time I write a blog, although I've been lurking around other people's blogs for a long time.

As the title says I am a true bookaholic. A horrible one, by the way. My family has learned to avoid coming with me to the bookstore, and I would be perfectly happy spending a whole day with my nose in a book.

Right now I'm rereading "Confessions of a Shopaholic", by Sophie Kinsella. Hence the blog's title (I'm not very original, I admit that).

http://www.fictiondb.com/author/sophie-kinsella~confessions-of-a-shopaholic~125435~b.htm

I love this book. It's a chick lit novel, with a heroine who's way too polite and totally incapable of stop shopping. Whether it's Cutting Back or Making More Money, every plan backfires. This book had me LOL in the subway, which made me look like a complete looney, I'm sure.

Well, I think that's enough for a first entry.