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Allergies, You Are a Stuck-Up, Half-Witted, Scruffy-Looking Nerfherder

Allergy season has hit Chicago, meaning I and most of my coworkers are sniffling/coughing/being generally gross. I used to be one of the privileged people who was unaffected at this time of year, but then oh, the distance I fell from my very high horse. If we met in person right now, I would in all likelihood glare at you and then refuse to speak, as talking hurts my throat and has made me generally irritable, but! these are the interwebs! So I can project a very happy-go-lucky state indeed. Now let's talk about books!

After a succession of reads that were just kind of 'eh,' I started to think I was going through what I've seen other book bloggers talk about as a dry spell, book-break, rest from reading, or what-have-you. But I have since revised my opinion, and decided instead that the books were really just kind of lame, and I am still very open to reading non-lame things.

SUCH AS -- The Mysterious Benedict Society! My gosh. Cannot tell you. Love. LOVE. I mean, things could change, as I'm not super-far into it, and I could suddenly find it boring or overly self-aware, or any number of things, but this morning I kissed it before returning it to my bag, and this does not happen with many books. No no no. My affections are bestowed upon a select few, and only when they fully deserve it. If memory serves, the only other book I've treated in an amorous manner is Bleak House by Dickens. I have one of those hardback, faux-old editions Barnes & Noble was selling a number of years back, and if my apartment were burning down, it would be in my top five books to save.

Anyway, the way my blog started was I entered Roof Beam Reader's TBR Pile Challenge, which I saw mentioned on Salon. It seemed like a good plan, since I have 150+ unread books on my shelves, and being the masochistic monkey who never learns, I keep buying more.

This TBR Challenge has actually proved most effective, as it's September and I'm on my eighth book (ok, I'm a little behind). I've owned Mysterious Benedict Society for two years, and since I'm behind on the challenge, thought I would pick it up since it's a children's book, and MY gosh. There's a certain intelligent, knowing tone that's in some of the children's books out today. Series of Unfortunate Events has it, and this book does too. You feel like you can trust the author, which is so important with contemporary lit, as the passage of time has not aided selecting what's good and what's crap, which leaves us with things like the unfortunate Twilight.

Anyway, it's great, and I recommend it as of 1/5 of the way through. Which isn't far, but oh well. Have an utterly fantastic Labor Day weekend, all. I plan on spending mine making an enormous amount of pasta and then eating it. Ah, America.

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