Books I Love
For some reason, one of my favorite reads as an adult was Brad Meltzer’s The Tenth Justice. I was working at B. Dalton in the Vancouver Mall at the time and still going to Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. Our assistant manager read it and talked about it.
It looked interesting so I picked it up. Could not put it down. This was a book like John Grisham’s The Firm that took off on a new tangent for me and it was wonderful. The main character wasn’t all that wonderful, but he grew and changed through the course of the events.
I don’t write thrillers, but I’ve studied this one several times, trying to grasp what it was that pulled me through the book and still does each time I look at it. I can’t just type in a first chapter. I end up having to read the entire book.
Yes, writers type in the works of other writers. It allows us to focus on the words they use and what techniques they are using to compel us to keep reading. It always works best to type in a portion of a book you love. And this is one I love.
While I haven’t ever written a thriller yet, perhaps someday I’ll manage it, or even a thrilling short story! Suspense I can do. Gothic I can do. I can even dabble in horror. Naturally, I can do cozies and such, but for some reason, the rollercoaster ride of a thriller eludes my storytelling brain.
The irony is that I love rollercoasters but perhaps I just don’t want to live one and I can’t seem to be mean enough to my characters to toss them into such a situation. Who knows?
What’s a book you keep coming back to over and over again?