In the beginning, there was a librarian … and she was fussy.

Actually, that’s not the beginning.

This is the beginning.

After her parents died under mysterious circumstances, a little girl was sent to live on a farm in rural Kansas, where she developed an unhealthy fascination with tornadoes at an early age. Worried that the girl and her little black dog would be eventually swept away, her uncle took her to town one day and introduced her to Mrs. Cleary, the librarian.

The little girl spent many an afternoon with Ramona, the librarian’s daughter, exploring interesting and strange worlds far away from Kansas. But while Ramona would be entertained by the books she read, the little girl felt compelled to master all of the amazing things she discovered.

So she became:

  • Fluent in Hindi.
  • Adept at juggling chain saws.
  • A master mechanic.
  • And a champion water skier.
  • And then she turned 14.

In high school, she was captain of the chess team, a drummer in the marching band, valedictorian of her class, and the anchor on the 4x100 relay team in track. But it was a fencing scholarship that got her admitted to the Sorbonne in Paris.
It was there that she had a brief, but intense romance with a young man obsessed with Mexican beer. She dumped him after deciding he was too boring.

Although she studied philosophy and quantum physics, she did computer programming after she graduated and invented a revolutionary program that you use every day. After selling it to a Fortune 500 company, she used the proceeds to travel the world. She learned the ancient martial art of Bokator from the Cambodian masters, French cooking from the chefs at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and Formula One race car driving from The Stig in the United Kingdom.

All of this kept her on the road quite a bit, obviously, so she was thrilled to discover e-readers and how they allowed her to take her books along, whether that was to Pamplona, Instanbul, or Buenos Aires.

A few years ago, realizing there were millions of titles available to readers, she set out to write a computer program that makes it easy for readers to find books that match their interests and preferences – including people who like their books without gratuitous sex and violence. She agreed to license it to us on the condition we keep her identity a secret.

That was easy since we have no idea who she is, either. We just get postcards from her from time to time as she learns more about her family history. Only last week she discovered that her grandmother became a spy for the CIA at the age of 70.

Really. We couldn’t make this stuff up!

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