The Adventures of Mikey Mouse

I LOVE to read! I have a small collection of books that I have read over and over and over. With no computer for 7 weeks, I started reading some of these books. But now that I have the computer back, I think I might have lost my mind. LOL For some reason, I have decided to start re-reading the Tales of the City book series. Written by Armistead Maupin, the first book of the series, Tales of the City, takes place in San Francisco in 1979-1980. It originally started out as a newspaper serial, which was later put into book form. I must admit, I got my first taste of TOTC by watching the first mini-series which was shown on PBS. Imagine, PBS showing homosexuality, drugs, and nudity! THE HORROR!!! LOL But after seeing the mini-series, I found the books and started reading all of them.

There are 6 books in the original series: Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others and Sure of You. Maupin also released another book in 2007, Michael Tolliver Lives, which brought a lot of the TOTC characters into the new millennium. And if you really wanted to stretch it out, Maupin also released The Night Listener which has 1 minor character that was also a minor character in TOTC. The Night Listener was released as a feature film starring Toni Collette and Robin Williams, but the book is MUCH better!

What makes the reading of the series so daunting to me is the fact I don't own the individual books, I have the 2 TOTC collections: 28 Barbary Lane and Back to Barbary Lane. The first collection, which contains Tales of the City, More Tales of the City and Further Tales of the City is 754 pages long. Back to Barbary Lane contains the other 3 stories and is just as long. Luckily the stories move quickly and it never feels like such a long task of reading.

This is probably the 6th or 7th time I will have read both books. And if this time will be like the last, I will finish the books with a very happy but sad feeling. And yes, Mikey Mouse does live on!