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Rana

At least you get actual stories when you encounter those triggers in the landscape. Mine tend more to be reiterations of whatever random thought popped into my head the first time I saw them: Driving past the sign for Wayne County, my brain starts up "Wayne. Wayne County. John Wayne. Dwayne the bathtub, I'm dwowning! Oh hell, I'm thinking about John Wayne again. And that dumb joke. Wayne, Wayne, Wayne. How far is it until we're home again?"

Every. Damn. Time.

Bill Altreuter

Funny, I was just thinking about Travis Magee the other day, wondering if anyone still reads those books. My gosh, they are more sexist than a 1974 Playboy magazine, and they got more and more violent as the series progressed. More formulaic, too, which I suppose is pretty much the inevitable way of these things. Towards the end you could pretty much skip about a third of each book. This is my boat, I won it in a card game. This is my car, it is a pickup truck welded to a Rolls Royce. This is my pal the economist. This is how I make a martini. Let me recap a previous adventure or two. Oh my! A smoking hot babe is in trouble! I take my retirement in pieces, so I will emerge now, for my fee. Let me explain about my fee.

They are every comforting, in a way, at least until the corpse of someone who has been flayed alive is found. And I've always thought that Meyer's advice about hard choices-- do the thing you don't want to-- is pretty good.

Dutch

Good Lord.

I thought I was the only one. I thought it some residual vestage of OCD.

Some people do their thinking in the shower.

I've got a big ass lawn and a leeeetle beeety mower. The missus has never mowed the yard, so she blows off my pleas for a riding lawn mower. Leaves plenty of time to watch mental movie reruns of Joe Hill's American Ghosts in certain parts of the yard. A little Dexter Dreaming Darkly along the orchard line. When I mow without my iPod, my inner ear actually itches for the absence of the ear buds.

There's a little patch I don't mow. I leave a little cover for the rabbits instead of slaloming the pin oaks. That's where I always think about Derringer's journalistic hypocricy, for some reason. Odd, I know, but it's become a self-fufilling reflex.

Effin'.

Weird.

Srsly. Weird. I thought it was just me.

kate

Stephanie Plum? No, no, noooo. After the third book you can write the dialogue yourself.

The first four or five books of Lindsay Davis and her Roman informant are really amusing.

Let's stick with Terry Pratchett.

Rob Hill

An industrious use of time! I haven't ventured much into audiobooks, but I've certainly gotten the bug for old radio shows like Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Nightbeat, and especially Suspense, which features some great adaptations from the likes of Cornell Woolrich and John Dickson Carr.

Lance

Bill, all the Magee books are still in print, so somebody must be reading them. I know exactly what you mean about the slide into formula and violence. I was trying to read all of them in order one summer in college. Then I hit The Green Ripper. I still like the books I liked, though, and Nancy Nall is another fan. Nance reads around the formula stuff to get at MacDonald's insights into how the world works.

Kate, I haven't actually read any of the Plum books. I've had them read to me by Lorelei King who's terrific and she covers up a lot of the flaws in the writing with her performances. And Nigel Planer, who reads most of the Pratchett books, is fantastic.

Dutch, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one either.

Dan

The Coffee Trader by David Liss, read by John Lee, is a great one, as is Terror, by Dan Simmons, read by John Lee as well. Love me some audiobooks!

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