I’m reading Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander right now and I’m quite enjoying it, though I’m only just beginning. Gabaldon’s books are long, long, long, which I find intimidating generally, especially with less than three months to go in 2014 and twelve books to go if I want to hit my goal of forty books this year. But here’s the deal: for the past two and a half years I’ve had very goal oriented reading tasks, and I wanted to read something fun, for me. And I’ve been postponing reading the Outlander series for a long time, five years in fact. I first noticed these books sometime in 2009, back when I would hang out at Barnes and Noble at least once a week, the year An Echo in the Bone was released in hardcover. That’s the one that takes place during the American Revolution. It sounded fascinating. My love of TIME TRAVEL stories goes back to 1985, when I first saw Back to the Future. Since then the idea of roaming around in time has fascinated me. I even wrote a story in sixth or seventh grade about a time travelling fellow who appeared mysteriously in my elementary school. I don’t remember the details (other than it was for a computer class project and was exceedingly long), though I think my friends and I time travelled back to Civil War times with the time travelling fellow. I have a feeling that if I were to try my hand at actually being a fiction writer I’d end up much like Pat Conroy, writing memoirs veiled as fiction. I’ve also been watching the Starz series that’s based on Outlander, and have been quite enjoying it. And here’s another confession: I am very excited to be reading Outlander, but the truth of the matter is that I’m diving into this series of books not for me, not because I have a life-long love of TIME TRAVEL fiction, though that’s true, but because I’m trying to capitalize on our blog’s current status as a repository of Diana Gabaldon reviews. I’m tired of all of our page views coming from Bethany’s posts about her books. I want to contribute! So that’s the truth. I’m putting off reading East of Eden, The Island of the Day Before, Crossing to Safety, The Witch With No Name, about five thousand books that my boss has lent me, as well as all the other books on my shelves, so I can try to get us more Google hits. I don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed. I guess I’ll be proud if it pays off.

But now it’s time to get back to watching the Giants game. I mean, reading important works of literature and thinking deeply about them. I mean, exercising. I mean…. Why can’t I just do everything I want to do all at the same time? I guess if I could figure out how to do that I would be a rich woman.