Manning the counter in my dad's health and wellness store while the real employees are at the county fair. We have a wide selection of vitamins and supplements, but people keep asking for crazy stuff.

Like oil of oregano. And Celadrin, which can apparently turn your arthritic sores into delicious wine.

An irritatingly precocious kid asked me a while ago if I was bored. I told him I wasn't, though I don't think he believed me. I'm not sure I believe me. Are broadband internet access and a good book really all it takes to entertain me for eight hours?

No, don't answer that. The book, by the way, is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, sort of a high-art version of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Illuminati fans can rejoice.

(English geeks can find an amusing takedown of The Da Vinci Code here. And there's even a condensed version for those of you who prefer pretty pictures.)

I really shouldn't write about how much I like a book before I finish it.

Sometimes the ending isn't that important. Murakami, who I often describe as my "favorite author," tends to end his books with a disappointing (and, in the case of Norwegian Wood, mind-boggling) sputter. P.K. Dick suffers from Chris Carter syndrome and seems to decide how to end a story about halfway through the climax, yet I read seven of his books before finally deciding to cut myself off.

I guess I grew to expect mediocre endings from those two, and figured that the ride was still worth it. Enjoying a new novel by a new author only to discover, in the second chapter, halfway through, ten pages from the end, that the book wasn't worth reading... that's a crushing blow. It's the literary equivalent of finding out she gave you a venereal disease.

I remember the stunning disappointments. Dave Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius — a book so awful that theologians believe a negative reaction to it constitutes indisputable evidence for the existence of the human soul — has a magnificently witty prologue that gave me high high hopes. Lucky Wander Boy, which I gushed about here, had a series of alternate endings reeking of authorial cowardice.

There's really no lesson here that wasn't already obvious. I like Foucault's Pendulum, really like it, even though I wouldn't have checked it out had all public library copies of The Name of the Rose — which Prof. Ternes emphatically recommended — not mysteriously disappeared.

Still, I am only 70 pages in. That's a measure of my enthusiasm, but I suppose it's also a warning.