I’ve never known something to have so much blatant power over me, or have I? Given what I know about me (when I stop long enough to think about it) I’m not sure why I’m shocked. I collected baseball cards as a kid, but I couldn’t just have the one card of my favorite player I had to have the entire collection of cards from that season. I couldn’t just have Barbie, I had to have Malibu Barbie and the one that came with the wedding dress and the Cowgirl Barbie, and Skipper and not just regular Ken but Malibu Ken too. Never mind how I played with the dolls, that’s a topic for another blog, but just the fact that once I got into them I had to have them all; or at least as many as my parents could afford to get me. The past few weeks of not being able to purchase any new books has been made only slightly bearable with the ability to download samples of books for free, and the fact that I realized that I had purchased a book a while ago that I hadn’t yet read; I just finished “Substitute for Love” by Karin Kallmaker. I can remember at the time of its purchase that I didn’t actually want to read it because I felt that maybe it would hit too close to home. I was right of course, and several places in the book made me cry, but I still managed to get through it in three days. Yesterday though, when I probably should have been working, I was busy putting together a wish list of all the Karin Kallmaker books I could find online. Unfortunately for me the majority of her books are for sale on the Bella Books website so they are typically two dollars more than they would be on B&N, and while I’d love to say “but it’s for a good cause, the cause of an authors livelihood” I know it’s only going to make my checking account all the more strained. But because I know I have to read everything by her I’ll do it, I’ll find a way to make it happen, if it means taking on a second job. Today, finally, I bought the third story in the Provincetown Romance series by Radclyffe. I have a long way to go still, before I read everything by her but I’ll get there; I’ve already finished the ‘Honor’ and ‘Justice’ series respectfully. Never having been a reader for pleasure I never even gave it a thought that this is what it would be like but now that I’m caught up in the throes of it, it’s kind of comforting knowing that this is my normal. Other authors I’ve already read everything from; Gerri Hill and Meghan O’Brien; not sure if Jerri Estes counts in this category since she’s only written one book but I’m throwing her in here too; Catherine Friend, and Colette Moody. I’ve even read the obscure stuff from Gerri Hill that I found on The Royal Academy of Bards website. I fear that this too I will “grow out of” as I did with baseball cards and Barbie dolls, but do I really need to? I once heard someone say that “everyone has something”, what was implied by the ‘something’ I plead naïve, but if e-books is my ‘something’, then I must be just like everyone else; nothing wrong with that. Okay, so I just edited out the part of the previous sentence about reading being my addiction, but only because the word addiction carries with it such a negative connotation. Even the synonyms listed for addiction are no better; compulsion, obsession, infatuation, but I guess that’s the nature of the synonym no matter how you spell it, they all mean the same thing, but I digress.
