Arrrgh!!!

I'm addicted to books. If there was a Bookanon, I'd have to stand up and say "Hi, my name is Buffy and I'm a bookaholic." I love fiction but I can be pursuaded to read non-fiction. I haven't joined a book club because I was afraid it might feed my habit, but I was sorely tempted on Easter when my sisters were all talking about the books they had been reading.

An online friend introduced to me two sci-fi series. One is the Honor Harrington saga by David Weber, and the other is the Miles Verkosigan series by Lois McMasters Bujold. Honor is a superb miliary officer who has half the galaxy lined up against her, including a number of politicians from her home world, who continually rises to the challenge to save the allies despite incredible odds. She has great personal loss, and a fair amount of personal gain. These stories are heavy on science and technology and military strategy and politics, but Weber has written them so well that I wade through all that to get to the charachter development. I read about six or eight of the books one after the other, and then had to wait for the most recent volume. With the last book, I had to take notes and keep a chart of who was who, just so I could follow the action. There were hundreds of characters! Still....I highly recommend them to anyone who likes sci-fi. Be sure to look for the Tree cats who communicate via sign language. <G>

Bujold's characters are incredibly addictive. Miles is everyone's favorite underdog, who manages to live by his wits in a mostly fictitious world of his own creation. Miles gets into trouble in his late teens while on a trip away from home and tries to bluff his way out of trouble pretending that he is an admiral. The bluff works and becomes his alter ego off planet for the next ten years. Trying to juggle the "Admiral" with his real life provides most of the humor in the books and almost all the delimma. Miles's take on the world is sufficiently off center that he sees options that others miss, and it's that creative thinking that will bring you back to these books again and again.

There are other series that I like. I think I have every one of Nora Roberts books, and maybe those by Linda Howard, too. I prefer the sensual or erotic romance to the ones where helpless women are saved by big strong men and then they go to bed as you read the last page. Save me from Harlequin and Siloutte books!

And then there are the mysteries and thrillers.....Carol O'Connell, Patricia Cornwall, Earlene Fowler, Susan Albert, Sue Grafton...and endless others.

We built our own house about 14 years ago, and we arranged to give up one foot of the depth of the master bedroom so that we could put a bookcase in the hallway. It's been filled about three times over in that time. We cull books to give to the library and to pass on to family and friends. I've had to stop buying gardening and quilting books, because there's no place to put them any longer. And then DH starting buying books on boats, and now we're REALLY in trouble!

In the kitchen, I have a floor to ceiling bookshelf overflowing with cookbooks. Mother has gone overboard and purchased every slow cooker cookbook she could find. We have a lot of the cookbooks published by Southern Living, and an entire section on Christmas cookies and holiday meals. Fred has studied Cantonese cooking, so we have a few of his cookbooks, and there are Mexican and Italian, soup, and bread cookbooks. I have cookbooks dedicated to potatoes, chicken, garlic, tomatoes and BEANS to mention a few! We may be one of the few households in the US who can provide FOUR recipies for Bagna Cauda! I gotta give some of them up or be found ten years from now when someone decides to clear away the mound of cookbooks in the kitchen!

Soooooooo....you could say I'm a bibliophile. Maybe I was supposed to be a librarian in this life! "Marian"........nah......that's no better than "Buffy" <G>