Hello, Jill here: curmudgeonly divorcee, printed-word addict, waaaaaaay up yonder in them there hills. From this dizzying height, some 2,000 feet above sea level in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I look down upon you urban dwellers and think, the poor
dears. How do they live, crammed together like sardines in all that dirty air? Up here, there are 1,000 Christmas trees growing for every human being and plenty of elbow room. You never meet a soul, which is a good thing, if you agree with Lord Goring that the only possible society is oneself. However, my half-dozen offspring keep me from getting too lonesome, and also keep me in shape hefting laundry baskets and pushing overloaded grocery carts. Some might suspect the altitude has gone to my head. They are right, and also my cakes all get craters and my bread dough scoffs at the very
idea of rising.
I have a very low tolerance for mediocrity. You'll find
no books on my Shelfari shelf that I don't like, even if it's an undisputed Great Book, so I'm more well-read than I may appear to be. I just can't see going to all the bother of tagging
The Old Man and the Sea (half a star) or
Leaves of Grass (three-quarters of a star). I'm a huge fan of British literature: Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, Jane Austen, the Brontes, John Mortimer, Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Dickens, Barbara Pym, Molly Keane, Lewis Carroll, A. A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling, Wilkie Collins, P. G. Wodehouse, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot--and Shakespeare, naturally.
I strive to be well-versed in the Southern and Appalachian writers, particularly women. I'm a fan of Eudora Welty, Lee Smith, Adriana Trigiani, Barbara Kingsolver, Sharyn McCrumb, Flannery O' Connor, Bobbie Ann Mason, Annie Dillard, Fannie Flagg,
etc. Among non-Southern Americans I dig Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, T. C. Boyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dorothy Parker, Laurie Notaro, Madeleine L'Engle, Connie Willis, Elinor Lipman, James Thurber, Laurie R. King, Woody Allen, Louisa May Alcott, Dave Barry, Pearl Buck, Dr. Suess, and Laura Ingalls Wilder--whose "Little House" books seem new every time I read them.
If I really, really adore a book, you can bet it's funny, or at least has an ironic or witty bite to it.
On my most beloved Shelfari group, "Anglophiles Anonymous," I have an alter ego named Maggie who is 12 years younger than I am and leads a very glamorous life in Sussex as the personal secretary to a Marquess named Tinky. Dame Maggie is a bit daft and fashion-backward, but she has a good heart and her whole life in front of her, although like all twenty-somethings, she doesn't know it. This is why most notes left on this page will make no sense whatsoever to anybody but my inner circle of Shelfari pals. No offense, but I like it that way. I remember when I first joined Shelfari, before I perfected my trademark "leave me alone" aura, I used to get provocative notes, like the one from a dude named Behrooz, requesting "a book on the sex situation." (Mine, yours, or the human predicament in general?) I still don't know whether Behrooz expected me to recommend such a book for his elucidation or write one myself--but if I
did write a book on sex, it would be entitled:
Scram and Let Me Read.
Funny Yanks' Quotations"It serves me right for keeping all of my eggs in one bastard." --Dorothy Parker
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing." --Robert Benchley
"Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years. --James Thurber
"Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business." --Dave Barry
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." --Mark Twain
"What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet." --Woody Allen
Funny Brits' Quotations"The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up." --Evelyn Waugh
"As I grow older and older/ And totter toward the tomb/ I find that I care less and less/ Who goes to bed with whom."
--Dorothy L. Sayers
"When widows exclaim loudly against second marriages, I would always lay a wager that the man, if not the wedding day, is absolutely fixed on." --Henry Fielding
"His answer trickled through my head like water through a sieve." --Lewis Carroll
"Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine."--Charles Dickens
"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." --Oscar Wilde
"The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt." --John Mortimer
"The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read/ With loads of learned lumber in his head." --Alexander Pope
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