The Geekiest Geek to Ever Geek Down the Pike, and Other Tales

There are, roughly speaking, two types of readers. One type is the book-buying type.  The hoarding type.  I fall into that category.  I love to own books.  Every now and then, when I miss my books, I rearrange them (which, apparently, I have in common with Bill Clinton).  Sometimes I get a little distressed over whether my various copies of Beowulf (which, I swear, are breeding on my shelf on their own), all my books about Tolkien, and my books by Tolkien should all be sorted together, or should be sorted by alphabetical order.  Should my signed copies of books be sorted onto a special shelf?  Or should they be mixed up with the others?  Stored in stacks, or with their spines vertical?  (This last dilemma is being solved for me because, in general, you can fit more books if they're stacked, and I am rapidly running out of space).  I dream of one day owning enough books that I can endow my own library.  I keep some books that I d...

Bitter Orange reminds me of a lot of other books.  One reviewer compared it to Rebecca , and the setting in a manor house called Lyntons is a reference to Wuthering Heights .  I am also currently suffering through Sophie's Choice (am I the only person who finds the narrator to be insufferable, the writing overwrought, and the general tenor to be racist and sexist?), and I had some initial difficulty in keeping the two books separate. It took me  a little while to get into the book for the reasons above, especially because Frances, the narrator is, like the narrator in Rebecca , very wishy washy and personality-less, which I find terribly annoying.  However, once I got a little further in, the mystery, hint of a ghost story, and sheer dramatical tension had me hooked.  Frances is an unreliable narrator, and the couple that she hooks up with, Cara and Peter, are charming and cosmopolitan, and clearly hiding something. Frances is visiting  English countr...