There seems to be a trend developing. Multiple people have recently been completely flummoxed by the title/author info of the same book. For example: I was putzing about... guess where? At the information desk, of course. As usual. (side note: no...I haven't been banished to "information desk purgatory." It's actually one of the only places in the store that I don't risk injuring myself after last summer's back surgery. I actually quite like it. I get to chat with lots of nice people, get condescended to by a few rude ones, and stay on top of what's current in the literary world.)

In any case: info desk. A lady inquired as to whether I might have the book entitled Lonely Legs. Grrk! All else aside, that is enough to warrant a few snickers. Lonely Legs! I successfully smothered a snicker. I refrained from querying, "Might it be found in the 'Relationships' section?" Instead I nodded sagely and began the attempt to look it up. I failed to find the title in any of the several programs we employ to locate books. Not in print, not out of print, not anything. I began to get suspicious. After all... LONELY LEGS, people. I then changed tack-- "Is it possible that there's another word in the title, or one might you have misremembered?

Pause. "No...I don't think s... Oh! Try Lovely Legs."

Oh my. I had an inkling. "Is this book, by any chance, the bestselling semi-autobiographical story of a 14 year old girl's murder and subsequent life in heaven, from where she watches her family cope with her tragic demise? Yes?"

And that would be...Alice Sebold's The LOVELY BONES. Lord only knows.

Likewise, a gentleman approached later to ask if I might help him find a book his wife had just requested on the phone: Allison Blog. Odd. I did the requisite fruitless search before I turned to him. "Is it possible there is another word in the title blah blah blah?" He thought a moment. " It could be Allison Blood, I guess. I couldn't really hear her that well on the phone."

A tiny light in a little room in a house in the neighbor hood at the far side of a city in my head went on. A tiny light in a little room where most of the bestsellers are kept.

(Aside: not that some of those books don't merit...well, merit... It's just that bestsellers are a breed of book unto themselves. The sort of thing that a bookseller must know not only by title, but by color and essence. When someone wanders confusedly over and asks for "that yellowy-greeny book" you must know to hand them the Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And when someone in a suit asks for 17 copies of "Who Cut My Cheese?" You must be able to, with a straight face, hand them the right amount of Who Moved My Cheese by Johnson and Blanchard. Secret Knowlege: The blue book about this big is The Lovely Bones but if it's about this big, it's The Blue Day Book. "The book with the horse" is the long awaited 5th prehistoric smut tome from Jean Auel called Shelters of Stone. And as much as you want to plead, "Look! Jose Saramago, or For God's sake! Look! Fredrick Buechner! There may not be a poorly painted horse on the cover, but I swear it's literature! You can't. End of aside.)

Allison Blood... Back to what the tiny light in the little room suggested. I cleared my throat. "Is this book, by any chance, the bestselling semi-autobiographical story of a 14 year old girl's murder and subsequent life in heaven, from where she watches her family cope with her tragic demise? Yes?"

That would be ALICE SEBOLD's The Lovely Bones. Enough already.

In an effort to increase my dorkiness quotient, I have begun playing Final Fantasy 9. Again. What can I say? I like it. I like most of the characters. The side quests don't make me gnaw my own arm off, and I have a weird obsession with chocabo upgrades.

So did I mention that to replace the pretty little fish who all died prematurely in a bowl on our bookshelf, I bought a gorgeous blue/red betta named Puddleglum? I pulled Snidely out and he skulked around in a mug of water while I scoured the bowl and removed the river rocks, which I was beginning to suspect had some toxic effect on fish. I replaced them with a bunch of shiny, tiny beadlike white things I bought specially that the fish store along with Puddleglum. I then placed both inhabitants and water in the bowl and peered hopefully in. Everything appeared normal. Until Snidlely tried to glide, svengali-like, across the floor of the bowl, and discovered that due to how small and light the shiny beads were, he only succeeded in floundering around and creating a teetering mound of beads, glued together by the byproducts of his angry struggles. Instead of him having something to hold onto, they were holding onto him. Now I'm no snail psychologist, but I'm pretty sure he was VERY angry. I gently propelled him to the glass wall with a chopstick which I then dried carefully and replaced in the silverware drawer. (NO! I threw it out! What are you thinking??)

He's stuck (literally) to the walls since then. There was a horrifying moment this afternoon when I glanced into the tank to see that Puddleglum had lost most of his color. I don't want to talk about it. When the Boy had comforted me through the wailing about never touching anything live again and getting myself sterilized in case I did this to my future children ("But they don't live in bowls," he reassured me) we ventured to look into the bowl to find that Snidely had extended... a ...something. Now, I've watched Snidely. (in terror, sometimes) He's got a head, with two eyes and those little whiskery things, and then two long feelers. This was...not...them. It was an armlike thing, like what comes out of a clam or something. It waved around. We both jerked back a couple of steps. Then the Boy blinked and said, "It's definitely time to check my email." We have not spoken of it since. Nor will we ever.