A Literary Mind Cleanse

I own more books than I have actually counted. The last time I attempted a number, I stopped after reaching 400. Some books are shelved in double rows--one row of books behind the other--and I still wander from bookshelf to bookshelf, muttering, "There's nothing to read."

The same goes for the movies I own; I suffer from an overabundance of entertainment choices.

The literary side recently received an infusion: Scarlet by Stephen Lawhead, and The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez. Both books have been languishing on the dining room table (which serves more as a book and manuscript repository than an actual dining location) for a while, though The Automatic Detective has been sampled on several occasions, usually days apart, until Friday night, when I consumed its remains in one long feast.

Nope, this isn't a book review (though Martinez does serve up one tasty treat in the detecting adventures of Mack Megaton). It is, however, a reminder of how cleansing a book can be when one's mental house needs swept for cobwebs and dust bunnies.

Yeah, I'm mixing metaphors--food and housekeeping--but both are good descriptors for the experience of reading a good book. Another excellent descriptor: a drink of cold, clean water. Or this one: a long, true rest after a hard day's work. I actually feel energized. Crazy, huh?

A desirable reading side-effect for writers is renewed creativity, a juicing of the battery cells, and that's precisely what's keeping me up at 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday after a tiring Friday. Some nagging problems with a for-publication piece of writing are starting to work themselves out, and I'm actually getting excited about a story that has been more difficult than it should be.

Just needed a little literary mind cleanse.

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For the science fiction junkies, here are a couple quotes from different Farscape episodes:

"No, Pilot, I'm here to tell you that the Nebari are a bunch of geeks!And that the damn mind-cleansing doesn't work on Mama Crichton's baby boy."

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nebari mental cleansing doesn't get the tough stains out.”