STOP ME BEFORE I SUBREFERENCE MYSELF AGAIN: It always kind of sucks to read and love a book by a first-time author. You finish the book and think shit, now I need to wait for this person to write his or her next book, whenever the heck that might be. And, of course, you could hit the big bummer jackpot and have that author be Donna Tartt, in which case you read the brilliant A Secret History in 1992 when it is first published, adore it, buy it for everyone you know, inscribe a special message in it for the guy who will one day become your husband, and wait eagerly for ten years for the author to get around to publishing another book -- then have that second book be The Little Friend, which you find to be unreadable.
The better approach, in my opinion, is to discover an author later on, when he or she has already written a bunch of books. This obviously works particularly well with the classics -- falling in love with Jane Austen is easy and suspenseless. Ditto Naguib Mahfouz. (Start with the Cairo Trilogy, if you're interested.) Even David Eddings makes his way onto this list -- I happened upon Pawn of Prophecy during the summer of 1992 and was thrilled to discover that I had the entire Belgariad and Malloreon waiting for me in paperback, not to mention the Elenium. The Tamuli was the only one requiring hardback purchases. (Read any Eddings book outside the scope of these four series at your own risk.)
This post was actually not intended to be about books. It was originally going to have a completely different first paragraph , but then I decided that the discovering-a-new-author analogy was a good one and went off on a tangent. I like the tangent, and so I'm keeping it. But the the original first paragraph of this post was going to be: "The reason why none of you have heard from me all weekend is that I have spent nine of its hours watching all nine episodes of the Grey's Anatomy Season 1 DVDs. And I now find myself wishing that I had waited even longer to start watching the show, so that I could sit down and watch 31 episodes in a single glorious weekend instead of just nine."
I guess that's a topic for a different post.
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