Books for the bus

I just finished a very enjoyable book from one of my favorite authors, and it only took me a year to do it!

Why so long? Because it was my bus book. My son's school is a 15-minute ride away. When I take him to school I don't read, of course. Plus when I'm going to pick him up or coming back after dropping him off, I generally walk. So I should say my book was my "taking the bus because I'm feeling lazy and/or it's raining" book. That's why it took a year to read 204 pages.

As you can see from the illustration, the book was Ghost Towns of the American West by Robert Silverberg. Better known as a science fiction author, Silverberg has written it all, from fantasy to erotica to history. I enjoyed this book and found it to be a perfect bus companion. It follows the development of boom-and-bust mining towns in the West. Since it hops from town to town, from amusing anecdote to amusing anecdote, it's very easy to read in short bursts without losing the overall thread. A perfect bus book, in other words.

As writers we need to think about all the ways people may use our work. Not everyone sits down for an hour or two to get through a big chunk of text. I used to do that a lot more than I do now, but work and fatherhood has limited that. I bet I'm not the only one!