I realized the other day that I'm holding back a lot from my blog, because you see, the blog was not really intended for the public. Of course, it is public as that is the very nature of a blog, but as you may have gathered (you being my enormous blog audience), I started it to keep track of some links and to record a sentence or two about the many books and way too many movies that I ingest. But then I realized that I had this blog that was really lame - a list of boring links and some mediocre book and movie reviews - a yawn fest. And besides that, the blog announced that I am a fiction writer. How pretentious can the blog get? Next the blog is going to start telling you about the straight A's I got in elementary school. The blog needed to develop a personality and stop being so damn stuffy. The blog needed to get laid.

The problem is I'm not over the weirdness of the blogging thing quite yet. I follow a few of my friends' blogs, and they've all followed this arc: They start out commenting as I am on the bizarreness of blogging, writing rambling posts about how they never thought they'd even start a blog. Then within a few weeks, they're revealing every detail about the boss that they hate and the annoying coworker who talks too much and the ex-boyfriend they ran into on the bus yesterday, who had an enormous issue with intimacy, and you know, other juicy stuff... So this aloofness may be just a phase I'm going through; I might get over it soon. If so, watch out, ex-boyfriends.

Books I'm reading right now:

Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood
The Librarian by Larry Beinhart

You'll be relieved to hear that I have stopped wheeling the weekend hours away watching movies, although I'm ashamed to admit that I've filled the void with Deadwood Season 2 and the first season of the Peep Show. More alarmingly, my aloof fondness for the Daily Show and the Colbert Report has snowballed into a full-on addiction, and I've been getting the shakes and sweats and hallucinating about baby goats when they're in re-run. Is that normal? It's just, when I don't have those two watching my back, I'm apprehensive about my knowledge of daily events, despite the two hours a day I spend tuned into Democracy Now, NPR, or one of those cable news channels that have all the rolling bars and side boxes to feed my ADD, and despite compulsively reading the Yahoo News headlines every chance I get during the day, and despite my addiction to periodicals of all shapes and sizes. The sages at Comedy Central summarize. They filter. They entertain.

So, yes when I learned that Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice when she was 21, I felt the gnawing acid of envy splash through my stomach, but then I paused (and turned the channel) and pondered. Was Miss Austen tempted by the triple Sirens of blogging, talking on the phone, and channel surfing at the same time? I think not. And if my only diversions were teatime and the English countryside, might I achieve more with my writing? Perhaps. But I think I'd miss Colbert.

To Kill a Mockingbird. What can I say? I loved it, loved Scout, loved Atticus, loved Capernicus and Jem and Dill and Boo Radley. I loved following Dill, Scout, and Jem through a long summer in the deep South as they speculate about the town recluse Boo Radley. And when the kids are sitting in that hot, humid courtroom watching Atticus pace back and forth, take off his jacket, hook his thumbs under his suspenders - I could hardly breathe. The book didn't let up after the trial either. I stayed up late to finish the last bit. It was just a perfectly framed story and the pacing was brilliant. At times, it made me feel like I was in the midst of one of those deliciously long summers that only exist in childhood, where the days stretch on with nothing much to do, but during the trial and the fight scene, the pacing was break-neck. The only criticism I have about the book is that it felt a tad heavy handed at times, as when Scout compares the Southerners to the Nazis. I thought I could feel the author's presence there, standing over Scout's shoulder. But by then I could forgive her for anything. The brilliance of the book is the realistic, likable characters. Atticus is capable of living in a bigoted society - chatting on the corners about the damned Yankees, griping about the War of Northern Aggression, demanding that his children read books to a sickly old racist woman - despite his outrage and condemnation of their bigotry. How do you live in a society that is backward and get along with, even love, people whose beliefs conflict entirely with yours? That's the most universal struggle that exists. But the conflict of the book, large and life-threatening and heart-breaking as it is, never takes away from Scout's childhood, which includes all the wondrous things about childhood that I miss - the safety of a parent's love, the innocence, the adventure, the fun.