Reading for the love of it.

During last night's all-night write-a-thon (brought to you in part by Mountain Dew Livewire, the official drink of summer 2003), before the weather guy went nuts because it was raining sideways, I caught a CBS news editorial comment by Bob Schieffer. The topic was those troublesome Harry Potter books and whether they're the devil or not. I'll spare you another tedious dressing-down on how the Harry Potter books are about as likely to get kids into witchcraft as Boxcar Children books are to turn them into hobos and just say Bob concluded that since there is no force more powerful than one's own imagination and since these cheesy books are encouraging mass amounts of snot-nosed brats to read, they can't be all bad. At least, they're not as evil as the microwave; just ask Ellen DeGeneres.

He also said a bunch of things that made me feel really guilty: television is incredibly lazy since it requires no effort on the part of the viewer (yeah, so I watched the same one hour of Up to the Minute on a loop from 1 until 5; sue me), no one appreciates a good book anymore (because apparently my encyclopedia of television doesn't count as a 'book'), western civilization will soon be overrun by the handbasket industry (the devil, I tells ya)...in short, the usual.

That's why I felt really good about reading today. I finished a murder mystery I've been working on for a few weeks now by simply sitting down and devoting an afternoon to the fine art of reading.

I love me some books, which is part of why I started working at a library a while back. The thing about working in a library was that it never gave me any time to read. I was always too busy reshelving various tomes or assisting cranky-ass library patrons to have any time to sit down and pore over any pages. And then you had the ill-conceived summer reading program for the children, during which I was always amazed that the other librarians didn't lie in the path of the bookmobile in a desperate attempt to stave off the nightmares it caused. But it's been a good seven months since I've been on the payroll at Soul-Sucking But Somehow Still Occasionally Fun Public Library, and in that time my love of reading has returned to its previous fever pitch.

Last year we saw the summer of Stephanie Plum, Trenton, New Jersey's most kickass bounty hunter. In fact, last summer was sort of the Summer of Trashy Beach Novels, thanks in no small part to my membership in the Reading with Ripa Book Club (who says morning shows aren't about some edutainment?) Two years ago, I powered through the Sue Grafton alphabet series of murder mysteries that introduced the delicious peanut butter and pickle sandwich into my diet. And there's this other book in my collection that I reread every summer throughout middle school. It's called The Freshman Detective Blues, and it totally sucks in retrospect, but I devoured every word of it each year.

Of course, summers throughout high school might have been more productively spent on those dastardly summer reading assignments we were given, and as if it wasn't enough that the eleventh-graders spent a decent portion of July struggling through Faulkner (who sucks my left one from beyond the grave), there was always a supplemental project that would ensure that we understood what we had read. Thankfully, those days are behind me.

Now I can focus on my own lollygagging 'exploration' of the classics. Salinger's Nine Stories is on the pile next to the bed, begging me to finish Pamie's new book (which everyone, ever, in the entire world needs to run right out and buy this second; also, ask your local library to order it. Why Girls Are Weird will see a second printing, dammit! Plus, how cool is it that she organized the book drive for Oakland? Pamie kicks ass. Go. Buy. The. Book. Seriously.) so I can be enlightened by an author whose prose is highly regarded by history as opposed to an author whose recaps are highly regarded by TWoPpers. Catch-22 is over in the bookshelf, waiting for me to get desperate.

And if I ever get bored of the classics, well, Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary hits the bookstores today, so I can peruse the new web-related entries for kicks. I'm sure Sars is having a religious experience with hers. The publication of a new Webster's is, I should think, akin to a literary solar eclipse, in that it happens once every ten years and it's a sight to see. Or something.

Every once in awhile, I forget how much I love reading, until I get to do it for hours at a stretch. And all it took was an incredibly gloomy, raining sideways day. That's the perfect kind of day, I think, to curl up on the couch with a peanut butter and pickle sandwich and man's other other best friend: a book.

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I thought it was kinda cool that so many people updated yesterday. All my regular haunts: Tomato Nation, Pineapple Girl, and Pamie, as well as some of my real-life friends, Daphne G, Kevin, and Rachel (who wrote this yesterday; I just forgot to post it for her until today). I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's a great day for reading on the Internet, too.