Weekly Geeks - Blurry Book Disorder

Recognition
Oh, I had a good laugh at this week's Geek challenge. Tara says,

B.B.D. (Blurry Book Disorder) : When one can no longer keep characters and storylines straight. Often brought on by reading multiple books from the same genre in a short period of time.

By the end of last year, I had a terrible case of B.B.D. I was mixing up couples, plot points, and even authors.

Tara goes on to suggest that alternating genres might help, and asks fellow Geeks to share strategies to avoid this dread disorder.

Why Pathologize?
Seeing as how I started reading romance in the 70s, I can only say that my answer is to embrace the disorder. Outside of my very favorites, I do not remember titles or authors, and I'm OK with that. I tend to remember character names the longest, and sometimes very basic plot points.

But it can be an advantage. Do you know WHY blonds have more fun? Highlight for the answer: Because they have such tiny little attention spans that everything always seems new and exciting!  OK, that was a cheap shot.  But you know, if you forget a book thoroughly enough, you can get two or three times the entertainment value!

Dave Barry once wrote this about remembering things in college:

The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.

It's very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was in college, I had to memorize --don't ask me why-- the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw. Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember something important like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket. It's a terrible waste of brain cells.

I suppose that if I remembered everything about every romance I ever read, I might be doomed to professorhood, which would be really hard because I think the number of  "Professor of Romance Novels" jobs is pretty small. So I like to think of my ability to forget most details, as a conservation of brain cells.