LAAAAAUUUREEEEEEN! *shakes fist ala Steven Colbert*

Do you know what I've done for the last 3 1/2 hours?  I sat down and I read.  And I read.  At one point, I got up to use the bathroom before making a stop in the kitchen - and decided that food could wait.  And I went back to my book.  In my little reading nook which I haven't used in far too long, despite not having turned down the A/C (the chair is right next to the unit).  At the start of my book, I had a beer that I only managed to drink by flailing around blindly with one hand as I was far too engrossed with the book in my other hand to bother looking up for it.

Surprisingly, I'm not talking about my normal reads.  It's not a fantasy, horror or, god forbid, even those rare romances that sneak their way into my hands.

Nope, it's a book that was cheerfully pushed on me by incandescently - Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated by Alison Arngrim.  If people can find me more hilariously and well written auto-biographies, I will take them!  I haven't read one so well written in, well, a very long time.

It's an amazing, hilarious, touching and, at times, heart breaking read.  She does talk about being a victim of child abuse - it's horrific, as it should be, but never graphic.

I watched this show (on reruns) when I was a kid and, like most people, hated Nellie.  But now I think I'll be looking at her with some fresh perspective.

Also:  the real bitch on the show wasn't Alison Arngrim who played the meanest character. ;)

So yes, thanks Lauren, for being the book pimp.  I haven't lost an evening with my nose in a book in so very long and I didn't know how much I really missed it.