I’m taking a short break from reading William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! While it’s a wonderful, poetic book — absolutely Faulkner at his best — that doesn’t exactly translate into an easy read, and I find I’ve been making excuses not to pick it up again. In fact, I haven’t been reading much of anything at all, and that can’t be good for me. So, after reading Emma Straub’s entertaining and insightful interview-essay on the appreciation of genre fiction (found via Neil Gaiman’s online journal) — and after I moped around Barnes and Noble for half an hour last night — I decided The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub was the way to go. So far, no complaints.