Jumping and Soaring

I've been doing some research for a short story and it's been a pretty somber body of reading, truth be told. I'm writing a story addressing the "suicide magnet" that is the Golden Gate Bridge. The more I look into it, the stranger the dichotomy becomes--it's a place of both great human achievement and crushing human misery. If you have the stomach for some hard reading, try the articles here and here.

So earlier I linked to the theme from Reading Rainbow. This show opened up lots of avenues for young readers. It also leads to an interesting question: What was your greatest adventure in reading?

For me it was finishing King's Dark Tower series. This series took up a decade of my life. I started reading it years ago, then waited anxiously for Stephen to finish up the series that would come to stand as his finest achievement in writing. My favorite book was Wizard and Glass, but the final installment was excellent also. I read most of it on an airplane on a trip back to Oregon, but the closer I got to the conclusion, the more anxiety I felt about the act of reading.

I didn't want to finish something I'd put so much of my time and energy into on an airplane, for the love of the Beam!

So I put it aside and made a trip to Cedar Key when we made it back to Florida. I read the last thirty pages on a beach, watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. And as darkness fell and the story came to its conclusion, it felt good. It felt right. And it was a fitting way to say goodbye, for the time being, to Roland Deschain and his obsession...

So which book stands as your greatest literary adventure? Have you ever planned a vacation around a particular book you've been anxious to read?