High

I'm high. Not on drugs...on books. I found this incredible web site called Book Slut and have spent countless hours reading reviews and info on books and magazines and horror and erotica and so much more but I have to take a breath now. *deep breath* The site has been out there for two years, but I am new to the whole blogging thing and LJ and Dead Journal, and now Blog Spot and just getting around to what most of you probably already know.

In the parlance of Book Slut, I'm a research slut, a reading slut, a slut for all things literate and wordy and wonderful. I admit I'm a bit behind the times, but I've been working and traveling and making my way thru the world and didn't have time for anything else, other than some of my own writing. I have a stack of books on the bench at the end of my bed I have yet to get to read, but I'm getting there. I have boxes of books back in Ohio in storage and I have read all those, some of them more than once, and you should have seen the hundreds of books I sold off before I hit the road and ended up in the glorious Rockies. And that isn't even the half of it. I have been reading since I don't know when. A description from To Kill a Mockingbird is apt. Scout is talking about when she learned to read, sitting on Atticus's lap and watching his finger move across the page until the words began to make sense and she could read. I don't remember sitting on my father's lap while he read the newspaper or a book, but I do remember the moment when the words made sense and I was pretty young.

I was born with a love of books and now I have lots more to investigate and read and catch up. Oh, if I only had a hundred lifetimes and could read everything written: good, bad and indifferent. The feel, the scent, the touch of a book on my mind and heart and emotions, the way I feel when I read a really stellar piece of writing or laugh out loud with the really witty parts, even the groans when something really awful has been written. I am constantly amazed at the wondrous (and sometimes really bad) ways that people can take the basic plots and turn them into stories. I want to hold and caress and read and re-read every single book, but funds are a bit tight now. I need Helene Hanff's bookish and oh-so-British Frank Doel's help to find those inexpensive and wonderful volumes slotted on dusty shelves at 84 Charing Cross Road, although Hamilton Books does a really good job with the $1.95 remainder specials. You can find almost anything, but not everything, and I need everything. I want everything. I want to be fed intravenously and just read. I don't want to sleep or walk or do anything but read and then write what strikes my mind, stirs my passions, moves me. I want to be entertained, appalled, frightened, and transported to worlds of imagination and reality. I want more books.

In the meantime, in my temporarily (I hope) embarrassed financial circumstances, I will have to settle for my first taste of Salman Rushdie and A. S. Byatt from the public library's plastic encased volumes. And I am going to have to revisit Douglas Adams's Restaurant and Hitch Hiker in borrowed volumes. I may even take a quick foray back to the Known Universe with Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson among those crowded and public shelves instead of pulling a well loved copy from my own boxes and shelves. But read I will until my eyes can no longer see and my ears no longer hear and I must learn Braille to get my literary fix.

Time to go dress for the trip and pick up my public copies so I can rush back here to read and wallow and explore yet another adventure, discovering new faces and places and ways to write.