Hey everybody, after a somewhat longer than intended leave of absence, I’ve come back to Fierce and Nerdy. Upon my return, I was both pleased and worried to learn that my first column in months would be for Book Week. Pleased because, well, who doesn’t like books? And worried because I haven’t finished a book in a while. By ‘finished,’ I mean finished reading, because I’ve been so busy finishing the fifth draft of the novel I’m writing, the one I started two years ago, and writing (or trying to write) the one, two, and four page synopses, the hook, the tagline, the elevator pitch, the back cover copy, the query letters (god help me), and rewrite over and over the first page, the first three pages, and the first chapter, that I haven’t had much time. This is a particularly lame excuse for not reading, I know, because one primary requirement of any aspiring writer is to read, read, and read! Actually, it’s not that I’m not reading, I’m just not finishing. I’m currently in the middle of two books about kids and death. The first is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It’s lovely and dark and I’m always a fan, but for some reason Gaiman’s voice in this one seems particularly stuffy and maybe my internal word centers have become too ‘Frenchified’, but I’m having a hard time cutting through the British. The other is Damned by Chuck Palahniuk, who I adore, and it’s interesting in that it’s about a 13-year-old in hell. The setting and geography are wonderfully inventive, and I’ve always loved the way he tells a story, but at 33%, I’m still not sure what this one’s about. So I’ll talk about a book I read a while...