Lally la, I am not cross at Martin Millar anymore

Because how can I be? He wrote Lonely Werewolf Girl out of sadness that Buffy was off the air. I so feel that. When I finish things that I love (Empire Records, good TV shows, Jane Eyre), I very frequently go off and write things myself – witness the way I am incredibly close to finishing a draft of my gardens story. So even though Martin Millar likes Amy the Rat, and I very greatly do not like Amy the Rat, I am not cross at him one bit for having an unusual spelling of his last name and making it difficult for me to acquire his books at the library.

And furthermore! One of his books! Is going back into print! So that I can purchase and read it! Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah! I enjoy to read new books!

Seriously, this is the year for good authors to write new books. It is all Salman Rushdie and Lynn Flewelling and Neil Gaiman and Martin Millar and Diana Wynne Jones and Elizabeth Peters and Robin McKinley this year. 2008, an excellent year for me and books. Not to mention that I have my very own bookshelf now, a massive tremendous bookshelf that reaches almost to the ceiling and contains virtually all my books except the really big ones like the dictionary and the Bartlett’s and the Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and so forth. The fact that it only takes one (albeit one very large) bookshelf to house all of my books makes me feel sad and empty. At home, we have something like sixteen bookshelves, bookshelves in every room except the bathrooms, and those bookshelves do not even come close to holding all our books. We stack them double. Whenever I look at my apartment bookshelf, I am simultaneously thrilled at the sight of all my books in one place, and dismayed that there are so few, and filled with a lust to purchase more, and more, and ever more!

And I really mustn’t. Even though I have that Amazon gift card. It is not sensible to purchase dozens of books from Amazon. Much more sensible to use that gift card to purchase textbooks. Sensible textbooks. Be sensible, Jenny. I don’t need Holes. I don’t need Lolita and The Doll-Mage and Keturah and Lord Death and Special Topics in Calamity Physics and The Yellow Wallpaper and my own copy of the Browning love letters and all the Casson books and a hardback copy of Fire and Hemlock and more copies of Greensleeves—

Yes. I don’t need any of these things. Not a bit.

I do, however, need Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me, partly because its title reminds me of a book by E.L. Konigsburg (oo, if I ever allow myself to carry out the book-buying orgy I yearn for, I will certainly have to acquire some things from the Konigsburg oeuvre – a nicer copy of the aforementioned (afore-referenced) Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, The View from Saturday), and partly because I like Martin Millar’s delightful books yet own none of them. I am living in deprivation until this state of affairs can be rectified.