Liz, Ugh, are there ever books up there! Lots of guilt-inducing Norton Anthologies of Everything and Oxford Companions to everything else. <lol> And, for me, the even more guilt-inducing language and linguistics-related texts. For some weird reason I feel duty bound to handle some of this stuff, but they're just *too* much. What a great problem to have, too many books! I hope you'll find some things that interest you to start validating, and don't worry about the beginner questions. If everyone read every list message with the idea of possibly needing the info later they would just forget most of it anyway and think, "Huh. I think I read something about that once..." <lol> Kellie