26 March 2006

Babies' due dates are rough estimates, really, barely more than guesses. One has to keep this in mind and recall that babies come when they're ready, or when the doctors and parents jointly decide on medical procedures to help them be ready, and not before. Otherwise one would jump six and nine-tenths inches every time the phone rings, expecting that one has a niece or nephew.

I mean, in theory. One might. Stranger things have happened.

You would think I had done something last week. I would certainly think I had done something last week, and I was there, so you'd think I'd know. And yet my to-do list looks rather longer, not rather shorter as one might expect. As though things had been accumulating. Sigh.

I'm currently reading Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty. I've just started it, and so far I hate everybody in it. I have hopes that the hating will stop soon. I have a secret love of boarding school books -- so secret I will now put it on the internet! -- but not to the point where I'm willing to tolerate all things in the name of a boarding school book. Still, the writing isn't bad enough to kick me out of the story, so I will continue to give the characters a chance to be, um, non-hateable. I'm not very far in yet, and the main character seems like the sort of YA protag who is supposed to grow into being a reasonable person over the course of the book, maybe. One can hope.

I'm not an identity reader: I don't have to find a character to identify with in order to enjoy a book. But there's a big, big difference between "identifies with" and "doesn't hate," and I really prefer to have the option of the latter somewhere in a book.

I hum with happiness when I look at my Amazon wishlist right now, because there is so much stuff coming out that I want to read. I will be such a spoiled kid over the next year or so. Booooooks. I know that part of what has happened here is that I'm more aware of the industry, so I'm less likely to be delighted and truly surprised when I walk into a bookstore. But the anticipation makes up for it, I think; and the other part of what's happened here is that a lot of people have written books I think I will like, and it's hard not to be happy about that.