I read a book!

I know I shouldn't sound so stoked about it, but boy am I. I think of myself as a Reader, and when weeks (months?!?) pass between books, I start to feel a bit antsy. And I don't know whether working in a bookstore caused me to avoid books in my free time (I hope that's not it, but I've known too many ice cream-hating Cold Stone employees to rule it out), or whether it was working in general that robbed me of the time or drive for reading, but it's been a while. I've been reading the weekly comics, but I'm not actually sure what my last book was. Yuck!

Oh, but all that has changed now. It's been almost exactly a month since I left my job at Borders, and I have finished a book!!! And, appropriately, the book I finished was yoinked on my last day of work, carried away from the store in the same bag that held my nametag lanyard and the assorted papery contents of my mailbox.

As a side note: there are many cool things about working at a bookstore. There are many lame things as well, but I think the cool ultimately outweighs the lame. And one of the mega-cool things that helps to tip those scales is the bookcase of promos in the manager's office. Borders gets metric tonnes of free books, movies, and CDs specifically for giving away to employees, so they can better recommend these items to customers. We're not just talking about romance novels and Wine for Dummies DVDs, either. Publishers won't send the huge releases, but many of the middling ones come in and wait to be yoinked by mild-mannered booksellers who become voracious book-readers in their off-hours. As I was cleaning out my mailbox, I found a coupon for 2 promos from the office that one of my supervisors had given me months ago for being so awesome. And, in Joe's office, I found an advance reading copy one of the books I'd been eyeing on the new hardcover table since it'd come out. Gold!

The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, snagged my eye initially because of its interesting cover design:
And the blurb on the back of the book was enticingly vague, promising mystery, murder, ghosts, romance, and even a literal 50-foot-long lake monster. All revolving around a graduate student's search for some family secrets in her small New York town (modeled after Cooperstown). Sounds cool, doesn't it?

I read the last 75 pages of the book last night and I have to say I'm highly satisfied. It was an engrossing read, both because the characters were so sympathetic and because the mystery was so compelling. The main character, Willie Upton, returns to her small town after leaving her Stanford graduate program in scandal. And when her mother reveals that there are some secrets in the family tree, Willie starts digging through the town's library, uncovering some seriously weird skeletons in some seriously oddly-shaped closets. The Monsters of Templeton is deliberately genre-bending, but in the end I'd probably call it mostly historically fiction, with some fantastical trappings thrown in for spice.

It's Lauren Groff's debut, and, especially as the various threads of the plot are first being set up, this is obvious. Even the plot blurb in the back of the book screams MFA grad. A wiki search just told me that she's got another novel on its way; I look forward to checking it out.

Now... time to browse the (newly alphabetized) bookshelves at Casa de Higabascio for something new to read. I'm back, baby!!