The Dewey Decimal System of Love

Okay, so I found this book for $5 on a clearance rack at Barnes & Noble. I thought to myself, "Huh...a book about a librarian falling in love. Fun."

So it's by Josephine Carr, and is entitled, The Dewey Decimal System of Love On the cover is a card that you could stick in the card catalogue. Since I barely remember using these, it makes me laugh.

Oh, yes, and it is my first filled requirement for the 9909 Challenge.

So, onto the story. Ally is not your typical librarian. Unless you count wearing her hair up, wearing "librarian clothes", having thick glasses, and her most intimate relationships are with books, then no, she's no typical librarian.

But when she goes to a concert and falls in love with the conductor (Aleski), her whole world changes. When he seems to be interested in her (never mind his lovely wife), everything is glorious.

Except the odd homeless man with a PhD from Harvard who may or may not be placing stink bombs in the library. And her boss, Gordon, who suddenly sees her as, well, a woman. And Yvonne, who's in love with Gordon. Oh, and did I mention that Aleski's lovely wife might be planning to kill him? How odd.

It's funny, yes. Not laugh-out-loud funny, but funny anyway. It's quick, and wraps up very nicely at the end. She bemoans her fate as a single woman (at about 40) after the first time she sees Aleski, and spends a lot of time talking to the reader (which is a little...unsettling).

Though, at the beginning of every chapter, it tells you where to find certain things in the Dewey Decimal System (oh, Dewey...).

Random Epiphanies and Why I've Been So Quiet

So, I had a really random epiphany today.

I'm re-reading Tribute by Nora Roberts, and I realize why I'm not such a big fan. I don't want to be Cilla, and I don't want a guy like Ford. I don't want their jobs, their cars, their lives.

Not that I want to be every character I read, but Nora Roberts has a way of making everything seem so cool.

One of the big reasons I always wanted to try playing the cello again was because Callie plays it in Birthright. A crazy awkward guy like Bo from Blue Smoke? That'd be cool.

But Cilla is a house rehabber, and Ford is...well, not my favorite NR man ever.

So that was my epiphany.

And why have I been so mysteriously absent lately? Well, I was working on homework, and then I re-read Divine Evil, then tried to read Broken by Kelley Armstrong, but decided that I'm really not that into her books. They take too long to get into, and I'm not sure how much I like the characters. Too much emotional drama, and I have enough of that in my own life, thanks.

And re-reading Tribute has taken me days, though who knows why. Nothing like today where my lunch break ended and I had something like 8 pages left. Makes me crazy.

The Excel List

So, I have this really complicated Excel list that I keep about the books I read.

There's the main spreadsheet, which includes all of the following (in order) on any book I read: Title, Author Last Name, Author First Name, Stars?, Last Read, Genre, Sex, Violence, Language, Religion, Fiction/Nonfiction?, Other Authors, Own?, Series?, Personal Notes.

Most are pretty self explanatory, but personal notes is where I put an abbreviated version of this.

I'm going to have to add a new column, though. Blogged. Because I'm going to start re-reading things that I've blogged (I already have for a few, in fact), and I don't want to double blog, or have to go check the stupid records.

Oh, the other spreadsheets in the file are Read in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, Books I Own (though I now have a new list in a separate file), and Thieves.

How did you think I kept up with how much I read every year and every month? It's on the list...

Haha

I love it when popular authors cite other popular authors.

I'm reading Bowled Over, a Maggie Kelly/Saint Just mystery right now. It's an odd series (Maggie is the writer, and Saint Just, or Alex, is the main character in her novels. That is, until one day he shows up on her doorstep in New York...)

And Maggie's talking about marrying off Saint Just in the books, and she cites Nora Roberts, who has this great series about a man and his cop wife.

The In Death series, written under the pseudonym of J.D. Robb, starring the ever sexy, debonair Roarke and his lovely wife, Lt. Eve Dallas. Never mind the books are mostly centered around Eve's cases...not around Roarke (which means she should have top billing, not him).

So there you go. Who doesn't love this type of random reference?

Or I was reading a Janet Evanovich once that cited a woman reading...some romance author that I had heard of... Joy.

Books Into Movies

Here's my question: when a book turns into a movie, does that up the books' sales?

I know that many do reprints with the actors on the covers (see Nights in Rodanthe, Pride and Prejudice, or The Pelican Brief), but does that mean they actually sell more?

And, what's more, how does that affect how we read the book?

I don't like books on tape (CD, iPod, whatever), for one specific reason. That's not how I hear the people in my head.

Shut up about mental issues. You know what I mean.

Take Harry Potter, for instance. When I say the name Harry Potter, you probably picture Daniel Radcliff right off the bat. But what about what J.K. Rowling thinks? What about what you thought before the movies came out? And what did Snape sound like before we had Alan Rickman's (amazingly well done) monotone?

Of course, my favorite example is the Twilight movie. While Robert Pattison is attractive, he is not what I pictured for Edward. (See my rant on this one here). So why is it that now, whenever I think of Edward and Twilight, I think of Robert Pattison?

It makes me sad.

Also, there are those times that a movie is based on the book. This little phrase has a very specific meaning. It means that they probably took a little from the book, and went their own way with the movie. Also very sad.

I don't know. Sometimes I wonder about weird things. And then I blog about them, because I don't know how else to talk about them.