Bookworm

I think I’m going to start writing some book reviews.  Ask my husband, and he’ll tell you, I read about 2 books a week.  Sometimes I think it’s not healthy.  But I can’t not have a book going – the book of the moment is Oracle Night by Paul Auster (I read Timbuktu and have been hooked on him ever since).  So I’m going to try to think of a way to structure this site – or another, though I think 2 blogs should be enough (see the other blog to which I contribute!  Exclamation point!!!).  I don’t know how people put those little pictures of books or movies or whatever in their lists, but I’m going to figure it out, or something cute and gimmicky like it.  I really feel, I don’t know, lazy in my writing here.  It’s great, I love keeping in touch with family and friends this way, and making a few new friends, too.  But I’m not forced to write well here, you know?  I just write.  And OK, I don’t really need more work, but this is "work" that I find rewarding in a way that photocopying and distributing the Summary Plan Documents for a company paid benefit just isn’t.  Call me crazy.  (PS, just between you and me, I’m entering another couple of poetry contests.  Heaven knows if I’m a poet, but it’s $1000 in prizes for each and maybe only a couple of people enter them?)

So, still a tapeworm (I don’t know how to link to my own previous entries, sigh, but the applicable "Tapeworm" entry is from like December ’05 maybe?)  I’m listening to an Agatha Christie mystery on my way to and from work at the moment.  I just finished a second reading of Tove Jansson’s Summer Book which I loved both times (but more the first time), and a third reading of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence.  OK – I just erased about 3 sentences that qualified my love of reading, described it as a flaw, and apologized for it.  What is wrong with me, I’m starting to sound like politicians – Me dumb, me no read, me plain folksy person.

 

Screw it.  I read, people, way more than I probably should (and that is true, sometimes my poor neglected husband just whimpers at me, but then I point at the Braves game which is perpetually broadcast online at our house and raise my eyebrow in a "glass houses" type look).  I love to read.  I hate tv.  We don’t have cable and I don’t miss it, because I spend most of my waking minutes reading books.  We have a television to which a DVD/VCR is hooked, and I do have some favorite tv shows that I get from Netflix (ahem, these would include Firefly, Arrested Development, Northern Exposure, Seinfeld, Veronica Mars, & Sex and the City, and now you know everything about me).  But I usually would rather read, and thus I usually do.  And now I want to impart my wisdom – subject you to – my opinion on books ranging from Bill Bryson to Virginia Woolf (her biography anyway, which I’m also reading at the moment and is just a splendid book) to my darling escapist Agatha Christie to Jasper Fforde – these are all absolute delights.  I haven’t even gotten into the heavies yet.  I just love books, I love ’em, and I love talking about them, and I love dissecting them, and damn if 20th Century Women Writers wasn’t one of the most life altering classes I’ve ever taken.

 

I feel like I just admitted to secretly being a man.  And I just split an infinitive.  So what?

 

So, now that my slathering love has been admitted and my secret hope to turn this into part catch-up-on-life, part New York Review of books blog, I’m going to have to close.  The battery on the laptop is dying, and the husband is, er, watching the Braves and clapping  in the next room.  Guess it’s time for me to close the blog and pick up my buddy Auster.  I wonder what he’ll have for me this time.