The Long Dark Tea-Time of The Founding Bettys

or...Why We Love our Fellow Bettys.  

That's me in the middle - except for the cigarette.

When Betty Keira and I first embarked on this blog over a year ago, we knew it would be hard work - and it is.  That's fine, Betty Keira and I are no strangers to hard work - it's written into our DNA ... Despite our age difference (which is on the far end of a RDD/Brit Nurse scale) of 17 years, we work extremely well together.  Our productivity is not just doubled by working together...it's on a much greater level of magnitude (think Richter Scale).  Had either of us attempted to do this alone, TUJD would have dribbled off into obscurity after a couple of months.  But it didn't.

Reading and writing one review each week is an incredibly grueling schedule - with attendant good and bad side effects. The good? We will be able to review the entire canon of 134ish books.  All of them - in a timely manner. The bad?  Sometimes it's just hard to do justice to The Venerable Neels awesomeness. 

There's a difference between reading a book for pleasure and reading a book by assignment.  That's part of the reason I don't usually care for book clubs - I really love to read - and I have a very eclectic taste in literature.  In doing this blog, our discretionary reading time/material has been severely limited - which is a great trial to both Betty Keira and myself.  It's like eating the same food that you love, every week.  You have to eat it, even if you're not in the mood.  To take the food analogy a little farther, let's pretend The Canon is actually the menu at a pizza parlor (do they actually still call them that?).  I'm using pizza for this example for two reasons. 

1. Pizza is one of my favorite foods.
2. Pizza is incredibly versatile...within the confines of its genre - much like Betty.

As much as I like it, and as varied as the toppings are...I don't want to eat it for every meal.  I also like hearty soups(Dickens, Sayers), desserts (Austen), meat and potatoes (non-fiction), and salads (hmm...too bad I'm not into gardening books).

All this is well and good you're saying, but what does it have to do with loving your fellow Bettys??? I'll tell you. 

It's your shared enthusiasm that makes it worth it.  Sharing your own 'pizza' recipes with us...which makes us cheerfully skip the laundry, procrastinate dinner and ignore the sticky floor in the kitchen.  As long as we have you, we'll still have pizza.