Kinda geeky today

Two books again today, but one of them was only about 200 pages long, so it was really more of a book-ette.

'Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day' by Ben Loory is a book of short (very short) stories. The jacket copy calls them "fairy tales" or "fables", but they really read more like dreams, or snippets of dreams. Most of the stories are under 10 pages long, so this really would be a great nightstand book, if you're one of those people who likes to read just before sleeping but is incapable of putting a book down before reaching the end of a chapter. I'm not normally a consumer of short fiction, but I wanted to read this because I was drawn in by the cover, which features a vast midnight-blue sea, a UFO, and an orange octopus tentacle. In short, the cover is Awesome. Really. Buy it for the cover, but keep it for the stories. Chances are, at least one of them will sneak into your dreams.

'Ready Player One' by Ernest Cline is a novel that was written with a deep and abiding love of all things '80s and that is enough to make me very fond of it. Add to that the fact that it's a near-future thriller/treasure hunt set mostly in a virtual world, and I start to think this book was written just for me. Well, me and every other geeky, or even slightly geeky, Gen X-er. Star Wars. Indiana Jones. John Hughes. Matthew Broderick. Vork. Joust. Monty Python. It's all in there. I wasn't sure how this was going to be as a read, though, because it's the first book from the guy who wrote the film Fanboys, which didn't quite work for me. So imagine my surprise when, although I had only planned on reading half before going to bed, I stayed up way later than I had intended because I needed to get to the confrontation with the Big Boss. Bravo, Mr. Cline, for creating a book about gaming that created in me the same compulsive need to reach the end that the best video games do.

Looking forward to cracking open the new Laura Lippman tonight. I'm pretty sure it's going to be excellent.