help! just finished my book and don't have another one lined

[Flaxbee]

up (like I usually do). Help! Help! I will go into panic mode if I don't have another book by the end of the weekend. The last two books I've read are Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. Really liked them both. Anyone have any suggestions?

[WCGreen]

1. Yes, Jane Austin's Book Club was a really goo book....

Saturday by Ian McEwan is perhaps the best book I have read over the last ten years...

And The Preservationist by David Maine is a fictional account of the Noah saga... It's funny and poignant at the same time...

[Flaxbee]

2. thank you - I'll go look those up...

going into 'town' tomorrow and can browse in a decent bookstore.

[MassLiberal]

4. Ian McEwan's really good

I thought Atonement was great.

[philosophie_en_rose]

3. Sunday Philosopher's Club by Alexander McCall Smith.

[Flaxbee]

5. oh, I love McCall Smith's Mme Ramotswe books, I'll check

this new series out... thanks!

[grasswire]

6. do you think this is some kind of addiction?

I've run into other people on the Internet who used the word "panic" to describe how they feel if they don't have another novel lined up to start when they finish the current one. Maybe someone needs to study this phenomenon -- I find it very interesting.

[Flaxbee]

7. might be. I love books, love reading, and like to have

a few lined up ready to go. I've always read, pre-preschool I was reading and my teachers used me almost as their teacher's aid, telling me to teach kids to sound out words when I was 5 years old and read along with them. My mom was the same way, reading all the time.

When I was working in DC in a very high-stress job, the only thing that would give me some peace of mind was to read John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey on the commute to and from work. (I was a laywer in a firm full of uber-type A personalities and it was exhausting and almost terrorizing). Rumpole is a low key barrister who makes constant fun of judges, fellow barristers, etc. I think the character helped me keep my sanity by NOT being caught up in the frenzy of that particular firm's practice, to see the humor in my situation.

It would be interesting to study the "need" for books. I'm pretty well adjusted, can be very social, put others at ease, outgoing - not necessarily introverted so I don't necessarily subscribe to the 'bookworm' theories, but I carry a book with me everywhere. I have a big handbag, nice and roomy for almost any size book. ;-)

[grasswire]

13. the people I've run into before...

...were addicted to romance novels. So I think there are probably two kinds of "needs" since obviously Rumpole is not the bodice ripper genre. I assumed it was an addiction to escape, because their own personal lives were rather bare or even grim.

[crispini]

8. Oh, if I don't have books in my house that are unread...

I have a deepseated feeling of unease. Not just the NEXT novel -- need to have at least a stack of five unread, some fiction, some nonfiction, in order to feel really secure. LOL!

[MrCoffee]

10. i'm the same way...it bothers me not to have one in the chamber.

if i don't have a stack of unread books on the nightstand, i head straight for the library.

[Omphaloskepsis]

11. I can't think of a better addiction to have...

I'm a drunk.

[crispini]

9. Well, it's very retro,

but if you like Jane Austen (not the book club, the original) you might want to try a trip through Trollope. I'm reading him now (the Palliser series) and enjoying it immensely.

[Flaxbee]

12. yes, I was thinking of heading back to

Thackeray, Trollope... I'll look for the series you mention later today at the bookstore...