"Elizabeth puts her hands on her hips. Elizabeth has shoulder-length brown hair that looks as if it has been cut with a straight razor and a mouth that could have done the cutting. Elizabeth is smart, ruthless and emotionally damaged; that is, she is a sales representative. If Elizabeth's brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye. If you saw it coming, you would cross the street. 'Do you want to ask me a question, Roger? Do you want to ask if I took your donut?'"

--Max Barry, Company

There are admittedly few perks of working at a university, and those perks there are tend to appeal to a very *special* type of person. When El Yo once asked me why I felt justified in taking two mental health days in two months, I asked him what it felt like to get a signing bonus, stock options, a Xmas bonus, a bonus for not running away crying, a salary that approached the industry-wide median for his field and a raise that included not only cost of living but actual merit.

UVM is my third university workplace, and all have had two perks in common: one, above-par benefits and two, interlibrary loan privileges. See? These are the types of things that are guaranteed to fill your university staff offices with hypochondriac bookworms. *Special*.

I fully include myself in the above description, and in fact received a stern rebuke from the ILL department earlier this year for requesting so many darn books! In return, I forwarded them an email from HR reiterating that staff members can request as many books on whatever godforsaken topics they'd like so sack it up, Bailey-Howe.

I've been trying to be better about using their service, trying to be a nicer, kinder chip on ILL's shoulders, and in fact have been going out of my way to do more research into what they have on hand before I send them out into the aether for an out-of-print copy of Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold by Caitlin R Kiernan*. And the research is paying off in terms of the quality of things I read. I'm no longer surviving on a sugary, fatty diet of 150-page cozy mysteries or Forgotten Realms novels--not that there's anything wrong with either of those genres, except that they all tend to blur together so you wind up dreaming about running a bakery in Minnesota while trying to figure out which orc killed the mayor and stole the Scone of the Spider Queen. Instead I'm reading more about what I'm reading and taking the time to find sequels to things I like.

For instance: the last three books I read:

Which is not to say that it's been all wine and roses. I read the first 50 pages of two other books before putting them on the floor for the Princess to chew on (Widdershins by Charles De Lint and Queen of Angels by Greg Bear). But I'm liking the process of researching for good reads almost as much as I'm enjoying the reading of them. Leila's Bod, querying on a particular author on Amazon (that's how I found Company), Bookslut's blog and Bookninja are all a good use of the internet. Words I never thought I'd type again after 1997.

Of course, as soon as I've given them some appropriate downtime, I'll ask ILL to find Max Barry's first novel, Syrup, which apparently has something to do with Hollywood, cola, corporate espionage and film school.

* This represents ILL's one and only failure to achieve the requested result. I in no way hold it against them. The damn thing's not even on ebay.