First questions

Does a blog need a raison d'etre? Maybe not. But if its name suggests a purpose or an identity, then you'd better follow through, hadn't you, if only ironically?

So. Bookfiend. Give me a moment to think...

I wrote my first book when I was eight years old. Well, define "book." It was called The Club, and I wrote it in red pencil on lined binder paper. This was not War and Peace... it ran to maybe ten pages, tops, and it was hardly text-heavy. Mostly it consisted of various lists and charts concerning the organization and activities (largely theoretical) of a club whose three members were myself and my best friends, the McRee brothers. I suspect I had not told the McRee brothers about some of the activities they were supposed to be involved in or important positions they occupied in our club. So... even in my first effort I was already reaching out toward fiction.

Now, it's true there are other words that might describe my project better than "book." Pamphlet, report, booklet, tract... True. But to me, The Club was written, it was complete, it had a unifying theme--all important attributes of a book, and quite possibly the only ones I was aware of at the time. It was a book. I was an author. End of discussion.

Reviews for The Club were lukewarm. My parents, I'm sorry to say, were not nearly as impressed as I expected them to be. Probably the word "nice" was used. But--you can see I was already learning the game--I felt that they had simply missed the point, or were somehow deficient in literary judgment.

I've had ample opportunity to employ this attitude over the years. There was the nature narrative (a la Sally Carrighar or Jean George), the spy novel (inspired by The Man From U.N.C.L.E), the children's adventure novel (Arthur Ransome's influence), the fantasy novel (Tolkien run amok), the foreign-correspondent novel (my Bogart period), and others too recent for me to feel comfortable about mentioning them. In all these cases, I had to resort to the cold comfort of the fact that critics sometimes just get it wrong.

All of which is just to say... books are pretty much alpha and omega to me. Reading them, writing them, dissecting them, imagining them. Doubtless I will stray off in other directions-- the utterly bizarre story of this year's Tour de France, for example--but in the end it will always be... back to books.