An Auspicious Time

I'm not a particularly unlucky person, and even supposing I were, I would never subscribe my bad luck to the usual superstitious juju, because I'm not afraid of walking under ladders unless there's an idiot with a bucket of paint at the top of it, I've kept black cats as pets, I think keeping a stuffed rabbit's foot is grotesque, and I think someone throwing salt over one's shoulder is a waste of good seasoning. So I think this June's Friday the 13th is the perfect time to start a MySpace blog. Call it defying superstition.

That said, I believe in the weirdest things. I believe in Ghosts, Aliens, and an All-Knowing Being, all three I've never physically seen--and I seldom believe anyone who says they have, but there's a potent feeling in my gut that tell me they exist.

What this all boils down to is that while I consider myself reasonably pragmatic in most things, I love escapism in books. I love to read stories, fiction or even non-fiction. And herein lies the essence of my blog: Books.

Many of us love it. Some of us have the pleasure of working for and with it. I work as a Web Publicist for a major publishing company and I have access to books pre-publication. That isn't to say that this blog is only going to be about pre-pub books. This blog will center around books: What I've read, what everyone else is reading, what's been turned into a movie, who wrote it, what I'm using as a door stop, what I used to hit my husband over the head with, what I'm reading to my son even if he's only five months old and doesn't understand a damn thing if has nothing to do with milk, his diaper, and his playtime, and the books I've been assigned for the month/season/divine punishment. For my innaugural book, I bring you the clever and saucy Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hilis.

Let me tell you a thing or two about this book. It's pink, it's short, and it was first published in 1937. When I first began to market this book to online bloggers, mostly of the chick lit persuasion, every single one of them considered it a "hoot" to read and review this book. Everyone thought that it was fascinating that a chick from the 1930s, when the 1950s woman was the future, would write a book about a woman living alone and--heaven forbid--liking it.

It's always with chagrin when I explain to them that you'd be surprised about how relevant a lot of the advice in the book is to today's "live aloner." And of course, again, they'd think what I said was a "hoot." I'm apparently very fluent in Owlese.

I couldn't blame anyone for doubting Ms. Hillis' credibility on the matter of living alone as a woman. She's not even alive anymore. That's not going to help the book's publicity, either, but the woman lived in a time when smoking women were fashionable (as in, having a cigarette was an accessory!). This counts for something, and she titled one of her chapters "The Pleasures of a Single Bed," in which she begins the chapter with,

"It is probably true that most people have more fun in bed than anywhere else,
and we are not being vulgar. Even going to bed alone can be alluring. There are
many times, in fact, when it's by far the most alluring way to go."

That's not a hoot. That's pure genius!