ArmchairBEA ~ introducing myself

Please tell us a little bit about yourself:  Who are you?  How long have you been blogging?  Why did you get into blogging?

This photo shows me with my brother Billy in front of our family's 1940 Plymouth.  Even though I've loved books since long before this picture was taken around 1944, I've changed a bit, as you can see by glancing at the more recent photo on the right sidebar.  I've been blogging since January 2007, mostly to talk about books with interesting people.

Where in the world are you blogging from?  Tell a random fact or something special about your current location.

I live north of the river in Chattanooga, Tennessee — famous for the "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" song and known as "The Scenic City of the South."  Looking north, my home is left of center in the distance.

What are you currently reading?

Clutter Busting by Brooks Palmer (2009) is helping me see that these piles of books are so heavy with negative vibes that I'm not living the free and joyous life I could be living.  As I read, I'm making headway at cleaning out my clutter.

Tell us one non-book-related thing that everyone reading your blog may not know about you.

I got acquainted with my best friend Donna, when she and I volunteered to summarize and ask questions about Charles Frazier's 1997 novel Cold Mountain for our online book group.  We called ourselves the Book Buddies, as part of Oprah's first book club in the late 1990s.  When Donna and I later opened a bookstore together, we named it for our online club.

If you could eat dinner with any author or character, who would it be and why?

Rita Nakashima Brock writes about women's issues in relation to theology.  She and Rebecca Ann Parker wrote Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, which I rated 9 of 10.  One of my friends heard her in Phoenix recently, and I'd like to talk with her — or both of these authors.

ArmchairBEA is having participants do introductions today.  Or we could blog about classic literature.