Steve Barancik, screenwriter (The Last Seduction). All I ever read is scripts! Now it's Absolutely Fabulous Two: The Complete Second Season, by Jennifer Saunders. Absolutely Fabulous is a British sitcom about the most decadent characters you've ever seen--two middle-aged women who're superficial to a fault. All they live for, the only thing they care about, is material goods. I'm just in awe of Jennifer Saunders as a screenwriter. People bad mouth TV, but I think she's a brilliant writer. She wrote the first eighteen episodes herself. Unlike American TV, they don't have a staff of writers, it's just Saunders, and to top it off she's also the lead in the show. Her sense of humor is brilliant, cynical, anarchic and everything else good. I'd recommend the book to everybody and even more so the show, which you should watch on tape, with remote control in hand so you can rewind the parts you miss. The difference between this and American sitcoms is that Saunders so obviously doesn't pander. She hasn't had to give in to executives who want to maximize their audience. She hasn't had to tone anything down. When you watch AbFab you can see what artistic freedom is and can be in TV in its purest form. It makes Seinfeld look moral. Charlie Harris, Manager of Fantasy Comics. I read all the time. I read when I'm walking, I read when I'm in line, I read when I'm riding a bicycle. People always honk at me for that so I try to take the back roads. I'm on my twelfth book so far this year and this one is probably the worst. It's The Curious Eat Themselves by John Straley, an author people are comparing to Tony Hillerman though there's really no comparison. I'm about 50 pages from the end now and it took about 150 pages to get good. It takes place in Alaska. It's a murder-crime-mystery, with environmental problems with an oil tanker as a subplot. It deals with the Alaskan Native Americans quite well, but other than that it isn't that great. A good book I read recently was Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses. It was really nice, I'd definitely recommend that. As for comics, a good one that came in recently is called Lakota: An Illustrated History. Sergio Macedo wrote and painted it. It's a beautiful book, fully painted and well-researched. It deals with the spiritual as well as the historical legacy of the Lakota people from 1860-1899. Bob Log III, Film Projectionist, Man-About-Town. I'm reading Nick Carter, Killmaster: The Korean Tiger, by Nick Carter. It's a spy novel but dirtier and more violent and stupid. It's part of a series of really, really, really low-budget, bad spy books with lots of killing and far too much sex. There are about 150 different ones; this is the Korean one. I'm on page 10 and Nick Carter has had sex with three people and killed two people and thought back about how he's killed some other people. He mostly has sex with women but he refers to animal sex occasionally--there's one woman kind of being raped by a tiger, but that's in another book. Occasionally he saves America but that's not really why you read it; you read it for sex and people dying. They're mostly from the sixties, and I get them at St. Vincent de Paul, which has an extensive selection of Nick Carter, Killmaster in the back. Every book has a picture of his head cut out--just his head, no neck--up in the corner. He looks like a Ken doll. I've read, like, 30 of them, and I'm not going to stop until I've read them all! If anyone wants to borrow one they can just come over.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth