I eat books now… I’ve been toying with the idea of making a book review website for a while now, and finally went through with it a few weeks ago.

iEATbooks.com.  Check it out.

It’s not just me.  There are about 9 people that review books.  Some writers are better than others…but whatever.

So I’m not going to bore WhatSomeWouldCallLies people with book reviews any more.  But I do want to keep count of the number of books I write…so I’ll keep posting just titles and maybe links to iEATbooks reviews here.

So I finished my 9th book of the year: Good Faith by Jane Smiley.  My iEATbooks review is here.

Holy shit, she wrote me back.

25 words of backstory: in the 3^rd grade one of my classmates was brutally murdered by a lady that is now sitting on death row waiting to be executed.

I’ve been obsessively Googling names involved with the crime in the past few years, and recently came across the address of the murderer.  I decided to write her a letter and I asked for a pen-friendship, never mentioning the relationship I had with her victim.

She wrote back.  She wrote a five page letter and included a picture and she kissed the paper where she signed her name.

In her letter she only briefly mentions the crime that got her where she is.  She said:

Had a bad habit.  I loved heroin and P.C.P.  I always wanted to be gone.  Far away mentally.  I’ll tell you why later.  I’m not one who blames crap and why I did what I did on my family.

Why I did what I did.

Julie commented on the blog post I wrote about the letter I mailed, and asked me what I was hoping to get out of this.  She said:

It’s not insane but it is out of the ordinary. I do have a question for you though. What would you like to get out of it? I get the weird thrill of wanting to write a murderer. It’s like wanting to take a stick and poke a bear. But what do you do after? What if she writes back? I’m sure these are all things you’ve already considered. Just be careful and don’t follow the rabbit too far down the rabbit hole.

Julie gives me way too much credit.  “I’m sure these are all things you’ve already considered.”  Not exactly.  But she is right about the bear metaphor.  In fact, this is a lot like poking a bear with a stick.  I’ve sat around and poked this bear all different ways – Googling names, looking people up on Facebook and Myspace – and it wasn’t until I poked the bear in the proper place that I got any reaction.

I guess I never really received the closure I was looking for.  Sure, my elementary school put the group of Autumn’s friends through some therapy sessions.  We planted a tree and had a dedication ceremony.  I’ve read all of the newspaper articles about the crime.  But since the 4th grade, I’ve never really had a conversation with anyone that went through this with me.

I’m not in touch with Ana Nguyen or Joshua M.

I guess I’m just looking for some dialogue on the topic.  And with this new pen-friend, it doesn’t look like she’ll be going anywhere anytime soon.

And part of me – the liberal anti-death penatly side, is worried that this woman is rotting in a jail cell and unable to communicate her remorse to people that want to hear it.

I’m going to continue writing to her.  I’ll post more when more happens.

My name is common.  I’m no John Smith, but there has to be quite a few Mike Lawsons out there.

My email address is just my name @gmail.com.  And about once a month I get emails from people that are trying to write to a different Mike Lawson – probably one that is MikeLawson12@gmail.com, or MikeJLawson@gmail.com or MichaelLawson@gmail.com.  And for whatever reason the email author just types is regular old “MikeLawson” and sends the email to me.

In the begining I just started ignoring the emails.  Then about a year ago I got a different Mike Lawson’s tax returns emailed to me from what I guess was a family member that did his taxes.  And I politely emailed back and said “you got the wrong email address.”

And now I’ve started to play around a little with the emails.  Reccently I got this email:

I quickly hit the “REPLY TO ALL” button and typed out the following message:

Who are you people??  I’m not paying a penny for some stupid fishing trip.

And then one of the recipients replied, but only sent the reply to me:

When I realized that nobody got this reply except for me, I sent this message:

You only sent this message to me…Duh!  If you want Ron to respond you should email him too.

Who are you people?

Eventually Ron Hall figured out that he got the wrong Mike Lawson’s email address and sent me this email:

I’ve blogged about it before (here and here) I absolutely love Easter Peeps Candies.  And it’s that time of year again when Easter candy starts filling the grocery aisles of my mind and I find that I can’t concentrate at work because I can’t think of anything else.

Luckily last year we found sugar-free peeps at Walmart and other fine retailers.  When I went to pick up a package at Walmart yesterday I found out that the stupid things have almost 30g of carbohydrates in them.  And I’m not just sugar-free any more…now I’m practically carb-free too.

So if I want to have a sugar-free Peep for dessert, I can – just as long as my entire meal contains close to 0 carbohydrates.  Lame sauce.

In dusty boxes I’ve found hundreds of pages of things that I’ve written – most of it pretty bad and inedible.  Some of it is funny.  Some of it isn’t.  Yesterday I found a sheet of paper with the following typed at the top:

And that’s it.  Nothing else.  I have no idea what I was writing.  A movie script?

I was about to type out a short story I wrote when I was 18, but as I was typing it I couldn’t fight the urge to edit and decided just to delete the whole thing.  Maybe another time.

Daniel is in Vancouver at the Winter Olympics, so I’ve had a lot of time to myself.  I love the hell out of him…but I have to be honest and say that it’s been kind of nice.  Sure, I miss him.  But I’m a loner.  And I love getting lost in a book for two hours after work.  Needless to say, I’ve been reading them faster than I can blog about them.  So this post is about two books.

First up, I read Kristy’s Great Idea – the first in the Baby-sitters Club series.  I kind of love that this book is so timeless.  If I had cared about normal boy things in the 1980s, and just recently stumbled upon these books (and ignored the hideous clothes on the cover), it’s possible to not know what year these novels take place in.

I also love how Stacey is super-ashamed of her Diabetes.  And she tells all the girls that she’s on a diet.  And it wasn’t until they caught her in a lie and were ready to kick her out of The Baby-Sitters Club (no apostrophe) did she finally fess up.

It was a really quick read, and I’m not sure I’ll be blogging about each of them as I go through them.  I’m going to read 1 through 10…but I’m still missing #3.  I found it on Amazon for less than $1.00 – so it’s on the way.

When I was reading this book I had an odd sense of guilt.  When I was a little boy, I looked up to my sister a lot.  She’s four years older than me.  And I learned at an early age that I wasn’t supposed to like the things that she liked (even though I wanted to so badly).  I remember how fascinated my sister was with this series, and I remember secretly being fascinated too – even though I hadn’t ever read one.

It feels good to be an adult that can scratch some of my childhood itches…but we’ll leave the Corey Haim thing alone.

Moving on…I just finished Hide And Seek by James Patterson.  And can someone please remind me to avoid crime novels when Daniel goes out of town next time?  It’s not an exceptionally gory book, but there are a few murders in there and a little bit of suspense.  I’m used to his books being super fast.  This book (which if I’m not mistaken is one of his earlier books) is slow-paced.

The story here was about a soccer player & a singer that get married and fall in love.  But when the singer’s career works out better than the footballer’s, Victoria Beckham Maggie Bradford ends up murdering her husband and she writes this book to explain what happened.  If you like airport-books (Grisham, Kellerman, Patterson), you’ll like this one.  I’ll warn you that Maggie is no Alex Cross.  This book isn’t up to par with what I’ve come to expect from a Patterson novel – there were no clever police work or interesting twists.  It was just a somewhat interesting story about a woman that happened to kill a couple of her husbands.  Meh.

If you’re counting, this is the 7th and 8th book I’ve read in 2010.

I found Jane Smiley’s Good Faith at the book fair last weekend – and I knew her name because of A Thousand Acres.  I picked it up, and I’m going to give it a go.

I’m still tinkering around a little bit…so you might see a few changes next time you click through.

What I like about this new theme is that it will kind of force me to take more photographs.  I even took a nice photo in the backyard today to go with this post, but I left my camera cord at the office, and Daniel took his card reader with him to Vancouver.  So instead I’m just posting this old photo I took at the Arizona State Fair a few years ago.

If I can get the scanner to work, I’m thinking about hand drawing the new site design.  Sound dumb??

We first met Bradley Dayton in Frank Anthony Polito’s first novel Band Fags, which I read and wrote about here.   This book isn’t exactly a sequel to Band Fags because the two main characters (the Band Fag and the Drama Queer) have a b.f.f. breakup and these books take place during that time when they weren’t super close and involved in one anothers lives.

When I read Marc Acito’s How I Paid For College and the “sequel” Attack of the Theater People I found myself bored and tempted to skip sections at a time.  “I don’t need to know all of Character A’s backstory…I just read it in your other book,” I thought to myself.

And to be honest, if Daniel hadn’t bought me Drama Queers for Christmas, the fear of repeat boring backstory might have stopped me from picking this book up.  Luckily, Polito was wise enough to write Drama Queers as a stand-alone that compliments or supplments his first book.  Knowing what I know about Jack, Brad’s best friend since the 7th grade, only helped me enjoy the second book more.

High School isn’t really easy for anyone, and as Polito’s stories accurately point out, figuring out you’re a F-A-G just complicates things.  As a former Band Fag and Drama Queer, this book was a nice throw-back to those days that I’m so glad are over.

The pace of this book was much better than Band Fags, and Polito seemed to get a lot of his impress-them-with-vast-early-80s-pop-culture-knowledge out of the way in the first book.

While I only slightly recommend Band Fags, I’d fully recommend you read Drama Queers.

My sister read them all when I was a kid, but I was never into them.  And I still think that maybe one day I’d like to write a young adult novel.  So I’m going to read the series.

I have almost all of the first 10 books – but I’m still in need of number 3 and number 9.  And doesn’t one of the baby sitters have diabetes?

This is the 6th book I’ve read in 2010.

Isn’t that the guy that OJ someone stabbed outside of Nicole Brown-Simpson’s house?