Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

It seems like ever since I started keeping my laptop next to my bed (it's been over a year now) I've grown terribly lazy (and cheap) in my reading habits, reading (and often re-reading and even re-re-reading) fanfics online instead of actual books by even favorite authors.

I even read the latest Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan-verse novel Captain Vorpatril's Alliance in a free electronic copy last September, thanks to missmurchison . . . and lost a lot of sleep, being unable to put down the laptop until morning's light, when I was just ten pages short of the ending and couldn't keep my eyes open a second longer!

But yesterday I became reacquainted with "my old self", in a sense, by spending all day and all night reading two novels by new-to-me (but probably not to anybody else!) author Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal . . . in super-cheap, used, library-surplus editions shipped to me from England, courtesy of Amazon, of course. :)

( How fanfic based on movies I didn't really enjoy got me interested in the books (possible spoilers) )

I haven't decided whether to go back and read the first Lecter novel, Red Dragon, yet (it was included in one volume with Silence of the Lambs in the old hardcover library edition I bought, and I read the first 60+ pages of Dragon before deciding that I'd prefer to dive right into Silence with the less damaged Clarice Starling as the protagonist, instead of Will Graham). And from some things I've heard/read in the fanfic, it sounds as though Hannibal Rising might be too much of a credibility stretch (plus, no Starling, of course, so . . . ).

Anyone out there have an opinion to offer? Am I missing out on some essential "Lecter-ness" if I never get around to reading the other novels?

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( Selected fanfic recommendations, mostly Starling/Lecter of some kind )

I got this email announcement -- which doesn't do anything for me since I'm still clinging desperately to paper books and refusing to do the e-books thing as yet -- and figured I'd pass it along to anyone who does happen to have a Kindle:

Adam Hamilton's new book When Christians Get it Wrong is available on Kindle for $.99 this week only.

I'm envious of the cheap prices people can get on Kindles, but as long as my eyes hold out for the reading of standard print on paper that's what I'll do.

For me, reading is more than eyes going over print -- it's about the smell of old paper and wood bookshelves, the sound of rustling paper, and the tactile sense of hardcovers and paperbacks, as well as always having the option (on books that I own, instead of having borrowed) to write in the margins literally as well as figuratively. The only sense not involved is taste, since I gave up sucking on books sometime around my third birthday!