Get really thrilled. I've started a book blog.

I'll wait here while you go find a container for your joy.

......

I said for years that I had no desire to do a separate blog for each topic I write about. About which I write. Stupid prissy syntax rules.

But lately I've thought ... well, maybe just one.

My whole life has revolved around books, bookstores, libraries, buying books, selling them, reviewing them, and I find I want to praise or rant about them fairly often. Thus, a book blog.

I've put it up, after only 3 days of tinkering, and there will be more tinkering, but there it is. AND it has only one new entry. I copied several old entries from this blog to that one, but my regular readers have already read them. The most recent entry is the only new one you'll find, for a few days anyway.

I actually had second thoughts. I mean, how often will I write in a single-topic blog? At this point - heck if I know! And do I really have much interesting to say about books and reading? But it took a lot of cutting and pasting to set it up, and I hate to have wasted the effort.

Problem is, I'm a classic example of someone whose résumé makes her look like she knows a lot about something, when she really doesn't.

For one thing, I was no English major. Or even English minor. I took exactly 2 classes beyond the required Freshman Comp.

One was on Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I actually took that course at the local college in the summer, in hope of using it to meet my freshman comp requirement, but that didn't work. I liked the class though.

The other was a "half-course," brief and for half-credit, on Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Margaret Atwood. Also liked the class, and liked 5 out of 6 of the books, but I could NOT slog through Emma. Emma is actually terrific. I read it last year and adored it, but my barely-formed brain couldn't handle that ThomasHardy-esque sentence structure in 1977.

And that's it for my actual literary education. I've read a gazillion mysteries and an odd assortment of other stuff. Sometimes I don't get around to an everybody's-read-that till late. I read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was 52. Oh, and it was really good. You should read it.

I don't toe party lines. I hate Wuthering Heights. Why it's such a BeeLOVEed CLAssic is beyond me. For once the movie made more sense.

Anyway, I'm a vast sea of ignorance. But I visit other book blogs and sometimes They. Drive. Me. Stark. Raving. Insane. As little as I know, I've realized that there are bloggers out there who read with most of their brain cells asleep. If they book blog, I might as well book blog.

It will include observations on how humanity values and treat books.

Since posting may be sporadic (or may not), to save time for readers who still check for updates instead of getting notifications, I have changed my link-list ...

----> over there on the sidebar ----->

...into that "most recently updated" mode. Blogs will creep down until they're updated, so that you can glance at it as it crawls toward the murky bottom of the list, and skip it till Fresh Deathless Prose shoots it to the top again!