First of all, I apologize to everyone who gets an email for every post that I put out – I’m undoubtedly choking your inbox today. It’s just a busy day.
With that, I do read on line quite a bit, especially with the 80 blogs that I follow, but when it comes to books I just don’t get around much with one exception: Jonathan Maberry. If you’ve read a few particular posts of mine, and my “about” page, you know that I’ve got a bit of a dark side that I like to keep malnourished but alive nonetheless. Mr. Maberry writes scientific fiction novels that center around, amongst other things, zombies. Zombies happen to be a favorite lately (see Zombieland with Woody Harrelson for a shining example) because you can shoot the hell out of them without making one special interest group mad – hell you can blow away a female zombie in a movie and nobody bats an eyelash. His books, while one could make the mistake in judgment from the titles, are not just about gore for the sake of gore either, they’re incredibly intricate stories and the only books that I’ve read since Steven King’s Gunslinger Series that I can’t put down.
I just downloaded my fourth Maberry book in an ongoing Saga, Assassin’s Code, to my iPhone Kindle and absolutely can’t wait to get into it (it was just released yesterday if I’m not mistaken). His first book, Patient Zero, starts off with the whole zombie theme and his hero, Joe Ledger is born. This is a series, so if you’re a shoot ’em up, special ops, underground action hero lover, do check out his books. They’re fantastic.
Just start out with Patient Zero first, then The Dragon Factory (this one was awesome) followed by The King of Plagues and finally Assassin’s code.
Happy reading.
Fit Recovery 
“Happy” reading, Jim? Didn’t you mean “scary” reading? (shudder). Teasing aside, it’s great when you can add relaxation as part of your regimen, and reading is a wonderful outlet.
In school, I used to hate reading – I have/had? ADHD and I had a hard time paying attention through a whole page (now I deal with manuals 1,000+ pages long, how funny is that?). I absolutely, utterly dreaded reading so up until I found action books, I was lucky to make it through a magazine article a month. For some reason though, the action/secret agent genre really kept me interested – so before I knew it, I’d be going through a 300 page book, once a month – Mack Bolan, man those were the days, they had about 4-6 writers so they could crank out one a month and I read ’em all! I ended up growing bored of them, maybe outgrowing them would be better, that lead to the gunslinger series and then I went through a long stretch where I only read project manuals… On vacation in Georgia with my wife’s sister and her family, one of my nephews was reading Patient Zero and it was just too heavy for him. I asked if I could read it, and within ten pages I was hooked. It read like a movie that took five or six days to unfold! That’s what I like about this guy – he actually writes his books like I watch a movie… It takes a special talent to keep me interested.
That’s really inspiring, Jim! Thanks for sharing!