Reading for the Rattled

 My five fav authors, the ones who draw me in, intrigue and cheer, help me escape even when I’m at my most brain jangled, distracted, discombobulated, blue and/or anxious:

Sherman Alexie, Martin Millar, John Scalzi, Christopher Moore and Carl Hiaasen.

Yeah sure, I'm keen on a shit-ton of other authors but these are my solidly, reliable go-to folk.

Except for Christopher Moore’s last one, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art, which, based on the description should have been a sure thing/slam dunk for literary escapism.

What’s not to love?

...part mystery, part history (sort of), part love story, and wholly hilarious as it follows a young baker-painter as he joins the dapper Henri Toulouse-Lautrec on a quest to unravel the mystery behind the supposed “suicide” of Vincent van Gogh.

 There’s paint, painters, baked goods (!!!) and mystery.  Maybe I was in more of a mind jangle than usual. I’ll try again.

Meantime, I could reread both Lamb and A Dirty Job (scroll down his site page a teensy bit to see the story synopses) a zillion times over and never get tired of them.

The same is true for Martin Millar’s The Good Fairies of New York and Lonely Werewolf Girl.

I tend not to reread Hiaason’s mysteries. Dunno why -- once seems enough but I’m always looking for new stuff from him.

I see from his website that there’s non-fiction that I’ve completely missed.

These two seem right up my midway:
Paradise Screwed, a collection of his columns from The Miami Herald

Since 1985 Hiaasen has been writing a regular column, which at one time or another has pissed off just about everybody in South Florida, including his own bosses.

and
Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World

Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. . . .
Disney isn't in the business of exploiting Nature so much as striving to improve upon it, constantly fine-tuning God's work.

 Now, I imagine I’ve gone on about Sherman Alexie before. His work has everything I want. Lyric beauty, joy, sorrow, confusion, deep emotional resonance, humor, wit, magic, all done with a near Raymond Carver-esque  economy of brushstrokes/words.

I’m reading Blasphemy  now but doling it out VERY slowly so it’ll last. Plus it’s a big ol’ hardcover -- can’t tote it in my pack without getting a backache.

At the top of the pile now is John Scalzi’s latest collection of columns from his blog Whatever,  whose tag line is Taunting the Tauntable since 1998.

an American science fiction author and online writer, and former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He is best known for his Old Man's War series, three novels of which have been nominated for the Hugo Award, and for his blog Whatever, at which he has written daily on a number of topics since 1998.

Old Man’s War isn’t jam packed with humor but the whole series totally grabbed me, pinned me to my chair and caused me to be oblivious to everything around me. ‘Cept Coco.

The Oblivion Express thing being a good and much needed quality often enough.

 The Android's Dream, in particular, is just dead hilarious -- good funny escapism.

"Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could really fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out."

Last night I was at 5,000 loose ends, having just finished The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (which is the first book in what looks like it'll be a molto interessante series) and was all ‘what to read, what to read?!’

So then, I’m good now. Thanks for listening while I worked this knot out.