Ch-Ch-Changes

I want to change the name of my blog!

I was never happy with In Today's Reading Room. It's a ripoff of my zine title In Today's Room which is a ripoff of a title of a song by Squeeze. In Today's Room is a wonderful title, but I wanted my blog to convey something about reading & I couldn't think of anything on the spot & for many days after that, so I just went liter-ally lame and called the damn thing In Today's Reading Room.

A few days ago, I was in a store and I heard Elvis Costello's "Everyday I Write The Book". Bingo! I thought I had my title at long last: Everyday I Read The Book. Perfect! Homage to Mr. Costello, title reflecting reading. Wonderful.

Or not.

I changed the title in my settings and anxiously waited for the new title to pop up so I could see it as others might see it. When it popped up, my lip curled in aversion. Everyday I Read The Book sounds like a religious blog! It sounds like I'm saying that I read the Bible everyday. While religious blogs are fine, and people who read the Bible everyday are admirable, that's not the impression I want to convey. It's not accurate. Changing the article to Everyday I Read A Book sounds like bragging -- even though it's really true -- but I don't want to sound that way.

Crap. Back to the drawing board.

Something........something to convey the utter bookwormishness of myself????!!! That part of myself that if I had the choice between buying lunch and buying books, I'd be off happily reading as my stomach gurgled? That aspect of my personality that says no to new socks without holes and yes to like-new first editions of old books?

Bookworm is overdone, shopworn, older than the holes in your granny's panties, as we used to say in grade school.

I also thought of Reading Coma -- that phrase I use to describe my utter enjoyment and absorption in a book. I could go with it, but I wouldn't be 100% happy.

I love the name of an online bookseller in Korea called What The Book? It's short & smart & edgy, touching on both the bewildered (as in "What the fuck...?) and bookloving parts of myself. But I can't bring myself to appropriate their name as a title for my blog. (This sort of thing wouldn't have bothered Jean Stafford for a moment. If she saw a title she liked, she grabbed it, and nuts to who'd used it first. She grabbed titles with great impunity from sources as varied as Mark Twain and St. Teresa of Avila.)

Speaking of title-coveting, I wish I'd thought of So Many Books, So Little Time before Sara Nelson.

I thought of being sort of sarcastic and calling the blog, Have You Read All Those Books? As any bookworm knows, this is the question that separates the readers from the non-readers, and it gets under a bookworm's skin. (Teeter's former husband was the first person who said that to Manfred, Sr. and me. I thought Manfred, Sr. was going to go into convulsions right then and there.)

On bookcrossing.com, we often refer to our piles of happily accumulated but as-of-yet unread books as Mt. TBR (To-Be-Read). I thought of that as a title, but it's too much of an "in" reference.

In addition, I've been coming up with titles that I'm not even going to put down here because they all sound bland, boring and educational, like I've been in bed with the National Library Association.

The current title I have up -- MY NOSE IN A BOOK -- comes from my mother's stock answer during my years at home when someone wanted to know where I was: "Oh, she's off somewhere with her nose in a book." I'm not really happy with it, but it pulls no punches in presenting me to the world as what I really am, and it's got "book" in the title.

If someone's got a better idea for a title, please leave a comment.