I love the library. I love books (paper ones. Ebooks...well, I didn't get my first CD until 2001, so does that tell you anything?), I love reading, and I love bookstores. When I was living in the city, I did some reading, but really didn't take as much advantage of the library system as I could have. For one, I was driving two to three hours per day; and two, I spent lunches and breaks at work gabbing with a work friend, who now no longer works with me. I really didn't have time to read, and I didn't realise how much I missed it until I moved to the suburbs.
My first dealings with the local library were not positive. I went to get my library card and was told that my photo ID had to show my current address, which it did not. It still doesn't, and I don't intend to change it because I'm not spending $30 on a license that is perfectly good for three more years (yes, I changed my address with the DMV, and my registration has my current address). I had assumed that I would just need to show a utility bill with my name and current address, along with the aforementioned photo ID. The woman I dealt with that first day said this was insufficient.
I spent a few months unhappy with the library. A friend encouraged me to try again with a different librarian (apparently my local library has some, er, persnickety folks working there), and it worked! Yay! Within a few weeks, I had also figured out the lovely website and hold system, so that during down times at work I could reserve books and pick them up on my way home. Library awesomeness was sealed when I recommended the library purchase a book...and one of the librarians reserved it for me via interlibrary loan, without my even asking! I was ridiculously excited about this and wrote them a warm thank-you email.
I do intend, with this blog, to occasionally review/discuss books that I'm reading. Today, I went and picked up three books--and two of them, I am extremely, dorkily excited about. The one I am--well, it's not that I'm not looking forward to reading it, because I am, but I did not do a happy dance in my chair when I found it on the website. That book is Elegies for the Broken Hearted by Christie Hogden. It looks very good and it will be the last of the three that I read.
The book I'm reading first has been reviewed as poorly written garbage. It's Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later by Francine Pascal. Yes, that Sweet Valley. Those crappy kids' novels we all read in elementary school (and middle school, I suppose), except now it's a crappy grown-up book that we'll all read on our lunch breaks at work. The only thing that would make me happier is if Ann M. Martin wrote an update to the The Babysitter's Club (yeah, I've read the update written by a blogger--it just made me want a REAL update even more!) (oh, and you know I'm a fan of Ann M. Martin on Facebook.) (OMG, I wonder if Francine Pascal has an FB fan page? Gotta check that out.).
In work-related dorkage, the second book I'm reading is Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking by Christopher Hadnagy. I almost texted my boss when I picked it up from the library--I totally want to give a powerpoint on this book at our next department meeting. Yeah, that's right, I'm volunteering to do a grown-up book report for work. I love my job and this is exactly what we come up against every day at work, so I think it'll be interesting to talk about.
So now I'm off to read some trash...
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