9 posts tagged “booking through thursday”

From BTT:

Are you a spine breaker? Or a dog-earer? Do you expect to keep your books in pristine condition even after you have read them? Does watching other readers bend the cover all the way round make you flinch or squeal in pain?

I am emphatically not a spine-breaker. No no no. I hate that. I have been known to occasionally dog-ear books to mark a quote or something. That's mostly with non-fiction books or school books, books that I feel were made to get worn in. My fiction books are not handled with gloves on or anything, but I do treat them respectfully. The edges of covers tend to get a bit beaten up from being put in purses or balanced on a table, but nothing gets ripped or bent if I can help it.

I don't like seeing people bend the covers around unless it's a novel or something for school. Since most of us buy used copies anyway, they're already beaten up, wirtten in, etc.

If you’re anything like me, one of your favorite reasons to read is for the
story. Not for the character development and interaction. Not because of the
descriptive, emotive powers of the writer. Not because of deep, literary meaning
hidden beneath layers of metaphor. (Even though those are all good things.) No …
it’s because you want to know what happens next?
Or, um, is it just me?

Yes and no. I have read books simply for the plot (most of the Twilight books) and I have read books simply for the language (The English Patient). The thing is, while those books were enjoyable enough, I didn't love them. I didn't absorb them and rave about them. A good book, to me, needs a combination of all of these:

Characters: At least one character has to be likable. That's why The English Patient felt hollow, and why I have such a hard time reading Steinbeck books.

Language: Language can be as indispensible as the plot. What would a Wodehouse book be without the appeal of its language? I don't really care if a book is evocative and flowery, as long as it is comprehensible and more-or-less readable. I dislike the very simple and the very embellished.

Plot: There is nothing more frustrating than a good story broken to pieces by philosophical or whale-related digression.

One last note: I have no use for "deep literary meaning", as defined by critics and scholars. Reading books not for enjoyment but for some other hazy academic reason is something I don't have any interest in doing. (I'm looking at you, James Joyce and Mrs Dalloway.)

Whether you usually read off of your own book pile or from the library shelves
NOW, chances are you started off with trips to the library. (There’s no way my
parents could otherwise have kept up with my book habit when I was 10.) So …
What is your earliest memory of a library? Who took you? Do you have you any
funny/odd memories of the library?

I did go to the library when I was a very young girl. I remember the children's section because it had a cushioned window seat that I loved to sit on. As I got older I didn't really go to the library. I mostly borrowed books from the shelves of my teachers in school.

Now, as a college student, I go to the library usually once a week. My local library is superb, with a wonderful media section and lots of room to sit down and read. They even have a small coffee shop! Last fall I would go down to read the library's copy of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a book too big to tote back with me. I would sit on a bench by a window on the second story, overlooking a tree and small pavillion. It was heaven.

From the awesome Booking Through Thursday:

Are there any particular worlds in books where you’d like to live?

Or where you certainly would NOT want to live?

What about authors? If you were a character, who would you trust to write your life?

The first, most obvious thought I had was that I could die happy if I lived in Middle-earth. Middle-earth has gorgeous scenery, loads of history, and is populated by handsome, chivalric men and elves. Maybe I would even be an elf! Sure, it's a little dangerous, but I could count on Tolkien to either see me through tough situations with grace and courage, or at least give me a rockin' death scene.

I think I would like to experience life in the 1800s or early 1900s. It seems like a very cool time to be alive, fictionally speaking. Oh, I almost forgot! The world of Wodehouse. That is my ultimate fantasy world. The old-fashioned feel, without those pesky things like wars and poverty and sufferage and stuff. To live at Blandings would be heaven, especially if Bertie and Jeeves came for a visit. :-)

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I would never choose to live in a dystopian novel, or anything by John Steinbeck. Things just don't end well for his characters.

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

Here's a confession...I own exactly one, a college writing guide. I only use it to remember the difference between MLA and APA formatting. I don't use dictionaries, I use the spell-check on my computer. I don't use a thesaurus, I use the thesaurus tool on Microsoft Office.

It's kind of shameful, actually, because I profess to value good grammar. I mean, I do find it important, but all of the "formal" rules of grammar get lost on me. You could say mine is a more "intuitive" grammar. I just know if things look or sound correct. Since I'm fairly well-read, it usually works out. At the very least no one calls me on it. ;-)

From Booking Through Thursday:

What’s your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody “knows” those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, “Huh? Never heard of it?”

The question above shows how wonderful the Internet is. Sure, in my everyday life many of my peers haven't read the books I have. But online, it is impossible to find a book that someone else hasn't read or heard of. I can't imagine living 50 years ago, with no connection to people who share the same interests as me. I think it would've been really isolating, especially for someone like me who was raised in fairly-small-town Ohio.

Sure, there are books that comparatively few have read, but that just means I have to look in more unusual places. Yay, search engines.

From Booking Through Thursday:

What with yesterday being Halloween, and all . . . do you read horror? Stories of things that go bump in the night and keep you from sleeping?

I don't read a lot of horror. I certainly have read some (Dracula comes to mind) but I don't seek it out. The only reason I read them is for ambiance, really. Like I have this book of Victorian ghost stories that I enjoyed, but they weren't really scary. That's the problem, I think. So many horror stories don't live up to the hype for me, like Dracula. There were some creepy parts, but the book as a whole is a bit more bland than scary.

I was trying to celebrate Halloween properly yesterday, so I checked out a book of ghost stories by M.R. James. It didn't work. I had no concentration, and they looked a little dense. (When a story starts off with a description of some French town it doesn't really help my interest level.) So instead I reread one of my favorite Holmes stories, 'The Sussex Vampire'. It ended up being a perfect Halloween read for me.

On another note, I think I'll post a long response to today's QotD.

From Booking Through Thursday:

I would enjoy reading a meme about people’s abandoned books. The books that you start but don’t finish say as much about you as the ones you actually read, sometimes because of the books themselves or because of the circumstances that prevent you from finishing. So . . . what books have you abandoned and why?

Great question. The most recently abandoned book was The Grapes of Wrath. I got to about page 60 and put it down to start another book. It's not as though I hated it or anything; it was readable enough. It's just that I find Steinbeck so...cold, I guess. His books are depressing, but that's not a problem for me. It's just that his characters aren't ones that I feel connected with, and the stories themselves are so bleak. I've read East of Eden, and while it was a good book, it wasn't one that resonated with me. I read it and recognized that it was a good book, but then I put it on the shelf and didn't pick it up again.

Other books that have been abandoned due to "lack of connection": Anna Karenina and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. I've also dropped Mrs. Dalloway. I didn't have any animosity, I just didn't care how it ended. I stopped reading it literally a few chapters from the end.

There were a few that I probably would've abandoned in high school if I had read them on my own, like:

• Heart of Darkness- I consider myself a pretty proficient reader, but yikes, that was a tough one to get through. So boring.
• Moby Dick- Here's the thing. The story itself is fantastic, and the writing is great. But by the end of the book there's about three chapters of pointlessness for every chapter of actual plot. I don't really care about harpoon types, or how to butcher a whale. If there had been more plot than filler, I would've liked it a lot.

There are a few that I may or may not have read on my own, like The Great Gatsby and Crime & Punishment. Gatsby seemed stupid to me (I was only 15, though, maybe now I would feel differently) but it was short and an easy read. C & P was a book that I enjoyed, but holy cow, was the protagonist whiny. [Spoiler alert!]             He does his murderin' early in the book and then spends the rest of the time being mopey and getting brain fever or whatever. That's all well and good for awhile, but virtually the whole book is his kind of self-indulgent inner struggle.

From Booking Through Thursday:

What’s the worst typographical error you’ve ever found in (or on) a book?

Hm, that's a good question. In recent memory, there's been one with really egregious typos. It was a super cheap copy of Murder Must Advertise, part of the Wimsey series. There were typos kind of all over the place, and at one point it seemed like they had omitted an entire sentence. Either that, or there was a really abrupt and confusing "scene change".

It's so annoying to find typos in a book. To me, it's the equivalent of "breaking the fourth wall" of a play. I get taken out of the story in an abrupt and frustrating way.