Negative Nelly Goes to the Library.

When I was a kid I had some issues with anticlimacticism. I'm not sure if that's actually a word but it's the best way I can think to describe the feeling of really really looking forward to something, like a sleepover or a birthday or an episode of Full House (random divergence: for a long time my brother and I were only allowed an hour of TV a day, and if we wanted to watch Perfect Strangers and Full House on Friday nights, it meant giving up the after-school halcyon hour of Get Smart reruns. Torture!), only to be kind of disappointed by the event itself. Maybe it's the Eeyore in me, but the more I look forward to something, the less awesome the thing itself seems to be.

I am sad to report that lately, this feeling has bled out into my reading. Two books I was really looking forward to turned out to be complete and utter washes. The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb sounded like my kind of literary crack: rich characters, generation-spanning plotlines, framed around a recent disaster (okay, not that I am into books about Columbine, but I love a good current plot point, especially one about twisted teens). But there's something about Lamb's writing that's just so unemotional and rough. I couldn't find anything sympathetic in this book. And then I skimmed ahead and saw that the narrator was going to spend the next 300 pages delving into some piece of his ancestors' past, and I saw the words "Civil War," and I promptly returned it to the library.

And then I checked out The Incident Report by Martha Baillie, which everyone in the library and literary worlds seems to be losing their minds over these days. On the surface it's a pretty great premise, especially for anyone who's ever worked in a public library (the few, the proud, the cranky). Every chapter of the book is framed as an incident report, those awful, tedious document that has to be completed everytime someone utters a death threat or barfs or calls your children's librarian a devil worshipper for dressing up on Halloween. Around the tenth report, I realized that this book hit way too close to home. I don't want to read about a library employee helping a patron figure out if the government is spying on her via the pizza truck parked outside her building. I live that shit. And I think I could've written it better. Because I'm a sore loser today, folks. A sore loser about to spend eight hours of sunshine indoors.

Here's something to look forward to though: A weekend spent re-reading Harry Potter and rekindling my university love affair with the Strokes, as well as all their killer side projects. (Thanks again, Noah.) Happy Friday, ducklings.