Dear Mr. M.T. Anderson,

I have to confess that I dogeared your book. Octavian. You know the one. I was reading along and thinking about smallpox and vaccines (a subject on which all my knowledge derives from fiction) and whether or not they really ate Brie at the time of the American Revolution (“‘I could eat Brie until I looked like soap'”) when you’ve just got to pull me out of the story with something like this:

“‘When I peer into the reaches of the most distant futurity, I fear that even in some unseen epoch when there are colonies even upon the moon itself, there shall still be gatherings like this, where the young, blinded by privilege, shall dance and giggle and compare their poxy lesions…We are a young country, a country of the young,’ he said bitterly. ‘The young must have their little entertainments.'” (page 203)

A trip to the moon, anyone?

“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”

You just had to be clever. Can you help it? Probably not.

And may I point out that the blotted out bits were eerily chilling? I may? Oh, thanks.

And a request for Volume 2, if I may? Could you talk your publisher into making a book with uncut pages, so that we your humble readers can sit with a letter opener and have the heretofore unknown pleasure of slitting the pages apart ourselves? Because the faux-cut pages look is so trendy. Everyone’s doing it. And I’m sure you don’t have much control over these things, so I’ll understand if it can’t happen. But could you at least put in a word with Candlewick? They seem like reasonable people.

Guilelessly,

Library Girl