Rainbow Rowell

I discovered the last couple of books I’ve read quite by accident.  More accurately, I discovered them the way that I once did—before I read so many books reviews and had such a long list of items on request from the library.  I browsed.  Browsing for fiction can be a daunting task, and I fully understand how people can be thoroughly overwhelmed at the prospect of finding something they will enjoy.  Books are arranged by author, after all, not their characteristics.  Readers’ Advisory guru Nancy Pearl has even suggested a pie chart method labeling books, so that potential readers could see

Some books are light confections, amuse-bouches that please in the moment but as soon as they are closed, disappear from the mind as quickly as cotton candy on the tongue. These lovelies absolutely have a place in my personal reading diet, and they are far harder to write than they seem.

I fell in love with my future husband through email in the year 2000. If I were a Jane Austen heroine, it would have been missives written with a quill by candlelight by Mr. Raphael and Miss Clapp, but in our case, it was the then-fairly-new phenomenon of an online dating site, the odd screen-names of “poewhit” and “bookchick”, and the far-less romantic electronic bits and bytes, zeroes and ones.