The hardest part of blog writing...

is coming up with a catchy name for a blog.  I envision my blog as an extension of my Goodreads site--a place where I can journal about my reading habits, interests, and musings and hopefully engage in reading conversations with my fellow readers.  Any good blog, or at least any blog that's going to attract a readership, needs a catchy name.  I ran through the usual suspects:  the Book Worm, the Bookshelf, the Voracious Reader...and I found hundreds of similarly named blogs all trying to attract the same small universe of followers.  Even my attempts to be a little off-the-mark--The Bluestocking, Calliope's Bookshelf--have been taken.  It suggests to me that we readers have too much time on our collective hands and not enough imagination.  My boyfriend Ethan receives all honor and laude  (blame?) for this blog's current incarnation, a suggestion designed to poke fun at my taste in books more than any attempt to be genuinely helpful.  That being said, Heathcliff's rather twisted attempt to break into Catherine's casket is one of my favorite scenes in literature:  this was my idea of high romance when I was an 8th grader muddling my way through Wuthering Heights for the first time.  I think my sense of romance (and good literature) became fixed at that moment--a macabre fact that hasn't served me well in either my reading tastes or my love life.

Currently reading James Ellroy's The Big Nowhere.  I have started it twice after falling asleep around the same ass-kicking scene in chapter three, which tells me that the ass-kissing is neither griping nor stomach churning.  If I can't make it past chapter three tonight, we will be moving on.