The Effects of Librotonin and other tales

I'm currently reading four books for the Ravelry Book Challenge, one of which I can't find. As of yesterday morning, I was only reading two books, one of which I can't find. Let me tell you why that is (not the bit about having one I can't find — that's never abnormal, and you know this if you've seen my house).

I have this brain problem. Every time I get in a certain radius of a book store, a chemical called librotonin is produced. This chemical is not dissimilar to serotonin, except that they're completely different. I have thus far been unable to compute the exact event horizon of librotonin, as once I'm close enough to the book store I'm sucked in and Must Buy More Books.

Needless to say, yesterday I crossed that threshold yet again, finding myself at Court Ave Books, our local used book store. (I generally gravitate toward the fiction section in a book store, to start off, so it was no surprise that I found myself in short order carrying Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion by Neil Gaiman. (I just finished reading the four-book Hitchhiker trilogy, and this was just the sort of thing I wanted to read after.)

I made my way then to the young adult area, because I wanted to see if there were more Madeline L'Engle books that I didn't have. And then Lloyd Alexander caught my eye. Well not Alexander himself — that would be rather extraordinary as he died last May — but his Prydain books. I was trying to decide which were the ones in the trilogy (because for some reason I thought those books were a trilogy and in fact, they're not) and chose the one that begins with the Assistant Pig-Keeper: The Book of Three.

Following my foray into children's literature, I then went to the front of the store where they keep the classics. You know, those books you always mean to read because everyone always talks about them but you suspect that they haven't read them either. I thought to myself, Ah, Jules Verne. He's one you ought to read, being all into steampunk and stuff. And I found his books and picked up 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; then I left the store before I could do more damage to my pocketbook.

Despite this librotonin effect, or perhaps because of it, I've finished seven fiction books and two non-fiction books, which you can see little thumbnails and ratings of in the sidebar yonder.


I was also going to write about the snow that fell last night, which was not heavy snow this time, thankfully. It's instead the sort of snow that looks like piles of big glitter flakes and acts like dust. It's the sort that, if you scoop it up in your hands and blow on it, it all comes back in your face and you get all snowy and damp.

It's the sort that, due to its powdery consistency, one shouldn't have to shovel it. In actuality one could go to an amusement park and purchase one of those dreadful little fans that run on a pair of AA batteries that don't really keep you cool but make you sweat just a little more when you point them at your face.

And that's all I really had to say about the snow.