What I've Missed by Being a Snob...

How could I have known?

I consider myself a fairly educated reader and try to avoid trash. That isn't to say that I don't delve into drugstore type books now and again. I will admit (gulp) that in the past I have read Nora Roberts, Maeve Binchy, Robert Ludlum and Dan Brown among others. But something was keeping me away from Chick Lit. Maybe it was because I work selling children's books and that tends to be what I read. And when I do read a "grown up" book I go for literary fiction - award winners, Canadian authors, etc. While working in the bookstore I mostly read adult books that had teen-crossover potential so I tended to stay away from books that were geared towards sexually active women! Okay, so here's what my years of staying away have done - they've deprived me until now of the joys of the Shopaholic series!

Why didn't anyone tell me? I'm listening to the first book on audio CD in the car & I LOVE IT! It is absolutely hilarious. Mind you it is making me simultaneously want to shop and want to cut up all my credit cards!

I did listen to "Good In Bed" on cd as well, which qualifies as Chick Lit. I did enjoy it but not to this extent.

So to all of you Shopaholic fans, I am sorry. You were right. Actually I never said they weren't good books or disuaded anyone from buying them, I just didn't get on the bandwagon myself until this week. And now I'm hooked.

Anna Karenina and Scrabble

I've been listening to the audio book (unabridged) of Anna Karenina on my computer at night while I obsessively play Bejeweled. I was doing alright for a while, even after having a brief confusion between Vronsky and Ablonsky's names. But then suddenly we were in the country or something with Levin and I was confused. So I rewound (which I hate doing) and will relisten (ugh) to that part again. I think I'm a fairly smart person and can follow complicated plots but here's what I think happened to confuse me: Scrabulous. Okay I am obsessed with this Facebook application. Totally obsessed. So obsessed that I sometimes calculate word scores while lying in bed thinking of possible words to play. I know how pathetic that sounds.

I had played a bit (poorly) before Xmas but it was in London at Christmas time when we played an actual game of Scrabble that suddenly I couldn't get enough. So now we play Scrabble at home, I played tonight at my mom's and the entire family is fighting to use the computer to put in their latest word on Scrabulous. How did this happen? Is it improving our vocabularies? Hmmm..I know that xi is the 14th letter of the Greek alphabet but that doesn't mean I'll ever use it that except when playing Scrabble or perhaps if I do a crossword puzzle.

It's like when we had Sim City on our old computer. I was so hooked - I'd stay up til the wee hours of the morning working on my city, raising taxes, laying pipes, etc. Then I'd think of it everywhere I went - pipes, road curves and industrial smokestacks in Toronto would seem so much more obvious to me. I'd drive through Scarborough with Dave & make comments about "Low Density Commercial", etc. It was insane. Same thing when I played too much Tetris. Or Solitaire or handheld Boggle (where oh where is that game?). I clearly have an addictive personality. Why don't I get addicted to doing my dishes? Or getting up early for work? I wouldn't be at all surprised to come home one day from work & have my family in my living room waiting to have an intervention.