Laura is well read.

Laura Drake is a crime reporter for the Edmonton Journal and a future lawyer. She is also the first person who asked to talk about books on this blog, and for that I will be forever grateful. Laura has never read the Twilight series and says “Fuck you, Yann Martel.”

Do you want to talk about books on the internet? e-mail me!

What kind of a reader are you?
I always read the same way: before bed, and until the book falls on to my face. There’s actually very few other situations where I’ll read. I usually get too distracted in other public places and I get sick on planes and cars if I focus on a book. Oh, I can read a ton on vacation. That’s the only other place. And, even then, most of the time I end up falling asleep with the book on my face. Still, I get through about five books a month this way.

In regards to choice, I have no consistent pattern of the types of books I’ll read. I’ve usually got one fiction and one non-fiction book on the go at any one time so I can flip between them, but I’ll start most anything I come across. Finishing is another story — if I don’t like a book by about page 60, there’s a 95 per cent chance I’ll quit. This is a terrible habit. The first 60 pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon, are really hard to churn through, but the rest of that book is amazing. I had to start it three times before I finished, though. On the other hand, sometimes I think it works out for me. I’ve never finished a Malcolm Gladwell book because I just get bored of the thesis statements before the book ends. We get it, Gladwell. Think with your gut. God.

Anyway, that’s the reason I’m glad I’m in a book club. If you’re in a book club you have to finish the book, or else people get mad at you eventually for only coming for the food.

What book have you reread more than any other?
Hrm…It’s got to be a children or young adults novel, because as a kid I had books instead of friends. Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli was my favourite book as a child, which makes me feel lame because that was already someone else’s answer on the blog. But whatever, it’s amazing. Everyone should read it. I’ve also read Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris dozens of times. I read it for the first time in Grade 11 and I think it was the first time that I realised a book could be amazing not because of plot or character, but simply because of the force of personality behind someone’s writing.

What book do you pretend to have read, but never actually have?
I don’t think I pretend to have read books, because when you say you haven’t read something yet, people will usually give you their copy, and then you have a free book. However, I do the opposite and pretend to not have read books that I have read. For example, I have not read all four books of the Twilight series…moving on.

Tell me about the last book you couldn’t put down.
I just finished the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and it was unreal. I even read the entire acknowledgments section, which was like 14 pages, because I didn’t want to stop reading it. It’s about a woman named Henriette Lacks who died in 1951 of cervical cancer. The doctors biopsied the tumour on her cervix and, as it turned out, hers were the first human cells to ever continue reproducing outside the human body. Because this was such a valuable scientific discovery – living human cells that could be experimented on without harming a living person – her cells have been reproduced so many times that their combined weight is more than the World Trade Centre. They’ve been in space, helped cure polio, used in AIDS research — pretty much every scientific endeavour you can think of.

However, her family was never told that her cells were taken or what they were used for. The Lacks family is poor, black and largely uneducated, and each of the living members of her family has difficulty understanding what was done with Henrietta’s cells, why, and why they’ve never been compensated for it. The author tells both their story and the story of the cells, and its mindblowing how she managed to make both stories completely accessible and entertaining.

Tell me about the worst book you’ve ever read.
This is going to be really controversial, because I know a lot of people love it, but I fucking hate Life of Pi. I only read it once, and I have no intention of ever going near it again to re-affirm what it was I hated so much, but from my recollection I found the prose tortured and condescending and the only reason I stuck with it was to find out how Pi could live with a tiger on the boat for that long, because there is a bit of suspense there, and then when you slog all the way through to the end it turns out that (spoiler alert) the tiger is himself?!? Fuck you, Yann Martel. That’s what I have to say about that. I slogged through hundreds of pages of your torpid prose only to hit a deus ex machina that literally is only a little bit better than the one in the last book of the Twilight series (which, by the way, I haven’t read. But if I had read it, I would tell you that it has the most ridiculous way of solving the love triangle that is built up over thousands of pages in the three other books to the point that my boyfriend (who has also not read the books) and I have a running joke that deus ex machina should be redubbed werewolf-falls-in-love-with-a-baby.)

Anyway, look. I have friends who love it and they tell me that it’s deeper than I think and that I’m not trying hard enough to interpret it and those people are wrong. It’s awful. I will say one good thing about Yann Martel, though, and that is that this Washington Post review that just savages his new book, Beatrice and Virgil, is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.

How do you get the books that you read – buy, borrow, trade?
I read books after my boyfriend does. He reads far more than I do, because he gets insomnia, so I usually just wait until he’s done with the pile of 18 he has by his side of the bed at any given time and be like “which one of those was best?” and then I read it. He mostly gets his books from the library and then I rack up fines on his card because I won’t let him return them on time. It’s a pretty good system for vetting books, I think, although it instills an undue amount of pride in me when I find and read a book before he does and it turns out to be good, because, if we’re being honest, it’s kind of embarrassing to be the book equivalent of a garbage eater. I think I kind of overcompensate by badgering him to read the books that I find first and then insisting that he like them.

What character from a book would you like to call your friend in real life?
Harry Potter, because I really want to know what pumpkin juice and Butterbeer taste like. Also, then all my problems would be solved with magic somehow.

Laura’s Must Reads
Other people have already said Me Talk Pretty One Day and Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and good for those people. Those books are awesome and also on my list, but since they’ve been done, here’s some others.
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. It’s historical non-fiction about a serial killer doctor at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. I drove everyone I know crazy for about two weeks by constantly rattling off facts about life in 1890s Chicago.
Heat, by Bill Buford. Anyone with any interest in food needs to read this book.
How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely. Meta-novel about the publishing industry. I laughed so hard I cried.
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje. Because it’s beautiful without being cloying or ridiculous.