Okay, I've had enough. Some time ago I plucked from the swap-a-book shelf a bodice-ripper entitled Something about Emmaline because the title was almost perfect. I was going to send it to Nisou as a gag present. Sometime in here I dreamt of a character called Sedgwick the Rodent, and that cracked me up. Her box ended up being really full, so I left the book out and considered sending it to CLH. Wrapping and packing, I skimmed its first page again and saw that I had not made up the dream-name, because there it was. Poop. I decided I wouldn't insult my sister with such a thing and decided it could be the booby prize for whoever won the pool for Scarf's baby: at the Yule party people could initial a date and guess B or G. o
On Christmas Day what did I find in my stocking but a Regency bodice ripper: CLH also gave me So You Think You Know Jane Austen? and figured I could use more Regency books since I've drained the Austen well dry. That present screams for re-gifting almost as much as the prize of the stocking, the Glade "room freshener" candle set into votive glass with a Thomas Kinkade scene. (Haitch, I have just given away your next birthday present! Please don't be heartbroken.) The reason I have had enough is that today at work I came across the name Sedgwick again, and damn it, I liked thinking that I had made up that name. "You pick up the paper, you read a name, you go out it turns up again and again." Yes, Kate.*
Perhaps I should take solace in knowing that--despite the knowledge being worthless, since I can't do anything with it--my idea for swing voters doing swing dance is still all mine.
And that my Ratty and Moley::Huck and Jim dissertation is still viable, especially considering Tom's unnecessarily complicating things compared with Toad's distressingly human traits.
My all-books-are-one-book thing isn't helping either. My last haul from the library included Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King and Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. Both have to do with Africa! And the Penguin edition of Bellow has a nice lion on the cover, and I just saw "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" on Monday! (Which was fine except that I wish Aslan's voice had been another unknown, like all the Pevensie children especially the charming Lucy, instead of--spoiler, Haitch?--Liam Neeson.) But I am 80 pages into Henderson and hating him (where the antecedent for "him" could be either Henderson or Bellow, who cares). Henderson is more hateful than Ignatius Reilly, and there's all this Heart of Darkness shit going on, and I asked ÜberBoss today if he's read Saul Bellow and he resolutely said no and again gave me permission not to finish a book. Eighty pages is less than a quarter through, and damn it, he's right, this is not a situation about which Bill could say, "There ought to be a law."
*Speaking of Kate, SMW gave me her new Aerial. I've been waiting only since 1993, Kate! No worries! SMW also gave me, proving herself the best notstepmother ever, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. My library is now complete.