A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

I know. I wouldn't think I'd read a book with a cover like this either. Alas.

To be completely fair, I didn't actually read this book - I listened to it. (Ah, the joys of the UNC library collection of audiobooks!) And despite the overarching theme of the supernatural, I found it pretty interesting. I'll go ahead and get to its main premise:

Charlie Asher is our main character; a new father and erratic secondhand store owner living in San Francisco. After a series of strange events, most of them involving death, Charlie finds out that he has fell upon a new job position: Death merchant.

This information is passed onto Charlie by a strange, tall, black man wearing a mint green jacket. Asher learns that this man (interestly named "Minty Fresh") is also a death merchant. Minty essentially becomes Charlie's mentor, explaining both their responsibilities and the consequences of not finishing every assignment. A "death merchant" is basically somone who must find artifacts containing people's souls (they glow red, which is how they are recognized) so that the nearly deceased can pass on to the next life (death) without falling into the hands of "the darkness". If said souls are not found in time, bad things happen. Really bad things. Make sense?

I think that if I had actually tried to read this - and I mean really read it, not listened to - I probably wouldn't have finished it. But that's only because I'm not a particularly big fan of supernatural literature. If there is such a thing.

Despite all that, I still enjoyed listening to Moore's macabre novel as I made photo copies and opened mail during work . Audiobooks are really a wonderful thing. So are mp3 players. I highly recommend the two together.

The Choice by Nicholas Sparks

If anyone else reads a lot of Nicholas Sparks books like I do, you already know the basic premise of every plot:

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Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Problem ensues, making it difficult for boy and girl to be together.

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The Choice is no exception.

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Travis Parker lives the perfect single life as a small town North Carolinian vet, until a pretty redhead named Gabby moves in next door. The two meet one day by chance that Gabby's dog has sudden complications with its pregnancy (after all, Travis is a verterinarian - who better to save the day?!). Despite the fact that Gabby is engaged (her fiance is out of town, or something), Travis repeatedly insists that Gabby hang out with him and his many family members and friends who come by for big outings quite often. Of course, after just a few short days (or maybe a week), Gabby and Travis fall in love. But what about her fiance?

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Nicholas Sparks says: Who gives a f***.

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There are several times throughout the book, you think, as a reader, Aw yes, that's "the choice" the title is referring to. But then a choice is made and the novel progresses. The more you think you know what exactly "The Choice" is, the farther away you are from the true obstacle of this novel. And you don't even get it until, like, the last 1/5 of the book.

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In fact, about 2/3 of this book deals with the short period of time in which Travis and Gabby fall in love. The second part (as Sparks so kindly labels "Part Two") flashes forward ELEVEN YEARS where the reader is slewn into the middle of a new, or rather, futuristic problem.

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Let's just say, I did not like this. At ALL. I already knew the couple would fall in love, but did he have to spend more than half of the novel showing us that? I wasn't even fully convinced, to be quite honest. I mean, can you really love someone after spending only a few days with them? Of course, Nicholas Sparks does live in a completely different world than us - his is perfect.

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Though the ending to this book was nice - and typical of Sparks - I felt the overall structure was very badly done. I'm not sure if I would have liked to see more pages to fill out the middle area that got skipped, or just less of the beginning. It was a fairly short novel in itself. Something tells me Sparks was feeling rushed with this one. That, or his 5 kids were driving him so bonkers that he couldn't think straight enough to write a coherently structured book.

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Ah, well. At least there's comfort in knowing Sparks will be releasing another novel some time this fall; and hopefully he'll have had a little more time to flesh this one out. We can only hope.