The Last Thing the World Needs

is another fiction book, wouldn't you say? According to a Publishers Weekly post, there were 764,448 self-published titles and 288,355 traditionally-published titles in 2009. Now, I know only a (sizeable) fraction of those were fiction, but honestly, that should hold even us rabid readers for the rest of our natural lives. Even the pickiest, most long-lived of us would only have to dip into 2008 if we ran out of 2009 titles.

I've been in something of an Ecclesiastes mind-frame recently. Possibly because I just finished Ecclesiastes in my for-lack-of-a-more-creative-approach practice of reading the Bible cover to cover, over and over. If you've never read Ecclesiastes, you only need to know these two facts:

1. It's been a popular source of book titles. Consider Remembrance of Things Past (1:11), A Time to Kill (3:3), The House of Mirth (7:4), and The Golden Bowl (12:6) for starters.
   
2. If he had lived to see all this book-naming based on his work, the writer of Ecclesiastes would only have sunk further into his Slough of Despond. After all, "Everything is vanity, a chasing after the wind," as my friend would say. And though he was lucky enough to get his little 12-chapter poetry essay on disillusionment picked up by those bestselling Hebrew Scriptures, even he lumps authorship into the Ultimately Fruitless Activities category. "The more words, the more vanity, and what is man the better?" (6:11)

All of which is to say, I've thought of a new book idea! While we're all wasting time, toiling away under the sun, thinking and doing nothing new, we may as well laugh (oh, and remember our Creator in the days of our youth). I'd love to do a Debbie Downer Bible, except clearly that title wouldn't work because SNL would sue my pants off, and wouldn't that be the ultimate bummer. If you follow me on Twitter (@CNDudley), you might catch bits and pieces of proto-book material. Whenever I hit a funny verse, I love to tweet about it. Keep ya posted.

And I'm writing again. Stuck on the cougar cruise, so I switched over to the in vitro twins. I may run out of energy (and $), however, and just throw these suckers up on Kindle for everyone to read on their phones and iPads and computer screens (and Kindles, of course). I love print copies as much as the next reader, but, as the Preacher says, "Of making many books there is no end" (12:12). And he didn't even have to pay for cover design.