A resurrection, a rejuvination, a resurgence, a renaissance, a return, a regeneration; or, too much time spent looking at the thesaurus

This blog has laid dormant for quite a while, and now seems as good a time as any to bring it back to life. When I first started Consider the Daffodil in 2008, I was deep in the middle of working full-time and going to school nights for my masters degree in Library Science. That quickly turned into no work but full-time school, and why I thought I could keep writing about books I read, I'll never understand. I started using it as an excuse not to do my class reading, and so I let the blog fall to the wayside.

Now, though, almost two years post-grad school, I've found myself in a situation that leads pretty perfectly to a book blog. Right out of school, I didn't get a fancy library or archives job like I had hoped; in fact, I struggled for over a year to get anything, even a retail job. A recession is the perfect time to graduate, right? I'm slightly more on track now, with a job at a local historical house (archival work included, although its mostly administrative) and a job at a Boston-area independent bookstore.

This bookstore, to put it lightly, is eccentric. Books seem to be placed randomly, although there really is a system in place (I promise). During my first few weeks there, I was certain I would never be able to locate books for customers, and now I'm able to fly to a shelf before they've even finished telling me what the book is. If you live near Boston, you know the store I'm talking about - feel free to stop in and say hi.

One of the most frequent questions posed to me by my coworkers in the first few weeks at the store was "So what do you read?" They meant it less in a get-to-know-you way and more so they could better understand how I could be useful around the shop. I mentioned sci-fi and fantasy and graphic novels, all things which are fairly under-read amongst the staff. And then I mentioned Young Adult - the Hunger Games, to be specific. Apparently no one in the store read YA, so in a matter of minutes, I found myself the defacto YA bookseller. Since then, I have had YA advanced readers heaped upon me, and these have formed unwieldy, unstable stacks next to my bed.

My friend Erin and I recently started a small YA book club as well, so YA books seem to be raining from the sky. Only two meetings in, we have a small but fairly vocal group.

As a side note, I've recently started listening the to Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which deals predominantly with science fiction, although it touches on other genres as well. This, in turn, has led me to listen to Pseudopod, Pod Castle, and Escape Pod, all genre short story podcasts. Many times, the hosts of Geek's Guide will refer to classics in the world of science fiction, and although I read tons (and I mean tons) of sci-fi in middle school and high school, I'm finding gaps in my education. So if random old genre novels show up on here, don't be surprised.