A Distinct Lack of Sugar and Spice

Since I started work on this blog I intended to intersperse the raging, angry, vitriolic posts with happier posts about book things I actually enjoy. This has turned out to be a Herculean task, because apparently I haven’t vented enough of my spleen to get to my happy cream filled center. (I'm still a “bastard coated bastard with bastard filling”. Bonus points for correctly identifying the source of that quote.)

Toward that goal I have been working on a post about one of my favorite lighthearted authors, Douglas Adams. Anyone familiar with his work who looked closely at this web address would know I'm a bit of a fan. Unfortunately, as much as I love his work, every time I sat down to write about it it ended up sounding like a book report. And not an awesome book report like the one I wrote about To Kill A Mockingbird, but a lame one, like the one I wrote on The Phantom Tollbooth. (Which I never actually finished reading. I hope that confession doesn't cause me to retroactively fail fourth grade English class.)

Anyway – in lieu of that I decided to kill two birds with one stone and share my many opinions about individual books and a link to an awesome book website in one post. The website is GoodReads. It's a great way to see what your friends are reading and connect with other book nerds. I've set up a BookWench profile and rated a lot of books. You can find me on the site by searching either my user name Bookwench or my email address bookwench.as@gmail.com. I constantly update my shelves and include mini-reviews of things. Plus, they have fun trivia, author interviews, author profiles, and interesting book discussions. I always look at my friends' lists before I go to the library to get inspiration for my book hunting.

All that being said, I hope I can get to a nice, calm place and give my favorite authors a fitting tribute on my humble blog. Until then I'll leave you with one of my all-time favorite, often referenced passages from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy (which includes 6 books):

"One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical."

And remember to support your local brick and mortar bookstores whenever you can. I worked at Borders for many, many years and made truly excellent friends there, a lot of whom have lost their jobs as the company spiraled towards bankruptcy.  

Plus – I need a job until my application for queen of the world is accepted.