Reading is fun

I'm not as active a reader as I'd like to be. It's not that I don't have more than enough material to keep me busy, I'm just lazy. My wish lists on Paperback Swap are impossibly long, and they get longer every time I hear about a great new book or see an interesting cover at a bookstore. I want to go back and read stuff from high school and college that I wasn't able to enjoy because I was too busy writing essays or analyzing them. This past summer I wanted to get through a stack of books that have been sitting around since forever, but I only managed to get through three of them. It didn't help that my enthusiasm was curbed with the first book, which I gave up on about 1/6 of the way in (The Other Boleyn Girl).

A good smutty book

I like smutty books; most of the books I read now have some theme about sex or drugs in them. I think that started when I read Memoirs of a Geisha, which led to my interest in Natsuo Kirino, the author of Out and Grotesque. I have Real World sitting on my shelf right now, but I'm waiting to read it until her next book is translated so I have something to look forward to (I'm a nerd lol). Kirino led me to other not-so-nice titles - In the Miso Soup, Battle Royale, Lost Girls and Love Hotels (super quick and super smutty!), After Dark and Tokyo Vice all fall into that sordid group. Jake Adelstein even tweeted me recently OMG I squee'd; I'm a big fan girl now because of that and the fact that he went to Sophia University. I'm reading his sugoi journalist tales of keeping up with the yakuza right now.

Go watch his Daily Show interview, he's funny.

But after a while I begin kind of guilty and spoiled by just reading fun books all the time, so I try to temper the filth with *real literature.* Normally I'd read the *real literature* in class, so I've been slacking on my own. I kept some Natsume Souseki novels from my last lit class and there are some other classic titles and anthologies lying around somewhere. Botchan has been staring at me from a shelf for about a year. And if they aren't anywhere in my room, I live near some funky used book stores where all the books are haphazardly stacked by genre and I have to wonder how they pass fire inspections.

I have been purposefully staying away from one author in particular - STEPHANIE MEYER. When I go to book stores I can usually pick up a book and read a couple pages, even if I chose only because the cover was pretty and I have no real interest in buying the book. I've tried ironically reading Twilight aloud to my friends who like the books, and I can't even make it through a damn paragraph without wanting to whip out a big angry red Sharpie and start editing. The films are unintentionally hilarious in part because the source material is so awful. Though her success does give me hope that maybe I could start writing bad fan fiction and make it rich and never work a day in my life.

Then I could just read smutty books all day!