a book questionnaire!
Apr. 15th, 2009 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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wanderlight (whose birthday it was yesterday: happy birthday, Rita!), as I am eager to write more entries that do not fall into the categories of Angst! Angst! Angst! and Stuff That I Did Today. Reading habits meme! Rita told her f-list all to do it, and I extend the same eager curiousity towards you lot as well! I love hearing about how other people interact with books.
1. Do you snack while you read? If so, favourite reading snack?
Surely you jest. dear interviewer? Books and food are nearly as intertwined in my psyche as Joss Whedon and character death. It isn't merely that I often find it necessary to hunt down a snack when I am doing some serious reading: it is a truth universally acknowledged that a Banui in possession of fresh-baked cookies or an apple must be in want of a book. I cannot savour food properly unless it is enjoyed in tandem with reading material. (Films or episodes of television can sometimes be substituted, but a book is still best.) I learnt to read at four, and almost immediately afterwards spent nearly every meal tucked into my chair with my knees against the table and a book propped on them. My mother kept a plastic mat underneath my chair for several years because in my book-enraptured state I would not exactly notice where my food was going. (Some of my oldest childhood favourites have distinctive food spills marking the pages. Most of my books have a smudge of chocolate or cheese or something on some page, whether or not it's immediately noticeable; rather as how every sheet I will ever own will acquire an inkstain eventually.)
As for particular favourite reading snacks: well, every Saturday on my way home from the library I stop at Hockman's Candy and purchase delicious homemade chocolates. Some choice flavours include: peppermint truffles, almond-flavoured truffles, chocolate caramels, peanut chewies (a delicious sticky gigantic mass of peanuts and caramel shelled in chocolate), peppermint chocolate chip candies, chocolate nougats (like Three Musketeers, except thick and rich and very homemade-tasting: exquisite!), chocolate-covered Oreos, chocolate-covered pretzels, sundry flavours of fudge... They know me by name there. Um... yes. But I also bake all the time: fresh cookies or cake and a book? And cold milk? And bread! Bread is my favourite snack in all the world. A mug of cocoa and a baguette and soft cheddar cheese (or rosemary olive oil bread spread with goat cheese) and an apple and some fresh cookies or cake or fudge or pie and some candles and a book and an open window: this is the most romantic and lovely atmosphere that I can create for myself.
2. Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
I can mark non-fiction books. My copies of Madeleine L'Engle's Two-Part Invention and Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz are full of underlined passages. But deliberate markings in fiction doesn't belong. It throws me straight out of the story: makes it feel like a collection of words, and not a place in which I am currently living. It makes it stop being real. It's like seeing a car in the background of a period film, or the boom dipping down into view for just a moment, or the colours wavering off. It doesn't belong.
The funny thing is that I often love books that other people have written in. Not for school, because those are often dull; I have books handed down from the children of my mother's friends with all of the adjectives underlined or the foreshadowing marked or the vocabulary words circled or what have you, and that's dead boring. But once in a while I find some stranger's notes in a secondhand book or a library book, and it fascinates me.
3. How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?
I've never really understood dog-earing. I don't want to keep a temporary place forever! And if it's an older book, and you've dog-eared it before, or if it's used and someone else has, how are you ever meant to find the one specific dog-ear that you want? I lay books flat open if I'm leaving them in one place, and use bookmarks when the book needs to go someplace (usually into my satchel) -- you know, if I can find a bookmark! But I have a lovely one thatbornofstars made me; and a green leather one my aunt bought for me in Wales bearing the legend Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwlll
4. Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?
I'd say that my reading material is roughly seventy percent fiction, thirty percent non-fiction. The thing is, I like stories, in whatever sort of shape or format they may come: films, songs, newspaper blurbs, NPR, strangers gossipping in my store, photographs, paintings, histories -- there are stories in dictionaries, if you know where to look for them. So if a story captivates me, I'll investigate it. Most of what I own in the non-fiction department is history/biography -- Madeleine L'Engle's biographies, of course, and Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra is a favourite, as characterised and engrossing as any novel -- or about languages -- I've read The Story of English about ten times, and The Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage at least four, and The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary three times, and then there are clusters of books on Anglo Saxon, and grammar, and etymology -- or about psychology -- not in the Freudian sense, but in the how-the-brain-acts-and-interacts sense, like Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, which I read straight through in an afternoon; I could not put it down. (I do not, alas, own it yet.) And then there are books about books -- I love books about books, whether fiction (Thomas Wharton's Salamander and The Logogryph; Cornelia Funke's Inkheart) or non-fiction (Library: An Unquiet History, and various books I've got from my library about different people's reading experiences, a year of reading, or the history of their life and poetry). And books on ballads and mythology and folklore! Any place where a story lies: that is where you will find me.
5. Hardcopy or audiobooks?
I cannot concentrate on audiobooks, which is sad, because I like the concept, especially when the author reads it himself and isNeil Gaiman really good at it. If I did a lot more busywork in one place, I'd play audiobooks -- my father, who has terrible eyesight and reads very slowly, but loves books about as much as I do, used to play audiobooks while making dinner, when I was little and my mother worked many evenings. It was very fascinating for me as a small child to listen in on Grown-Up Books: I don't even remember most of them or what they were about or even what happened (I have a vague memory of A Tale of Two Cities, and my father attempting to explain To Kill a Mockingbird to me), but it was interesting. He listens to them while driving, too. I think I'd like to take a road trip and listen to audiobooks. But I love books as physical objects -- I love them intensely (which makes the Kindle about as revolting to me as robot customer service: it's like a book with NO SOUL; and someday I will write about how I can wholly support and own an iPod but the Kindle gives me hives) -- and love the physical experience of reading them too much for anything ever to come close to replacing that.
6. Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?
...Put books down? Only if I've read them before and know what is going to happen, and sometimes not even then. I have read books in the car, risking nausea, and while walking, and I suspect I have even read in my sleep.
7. If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away? Write it down to look it up later?
I don't... notice unfamiliar words, exactly. Nearly always I can suss out the meaning by context (or linguistic detective skills), and if it's particularly fascinating and savoury, I look it up later a) to commit it to memory, and b) to make certain that when I use it eventually I won't miss some especial shade of meaning. Anyway, there aren't very many unfamiliar words. *sheepish shrug* Anyway, when I'm reading I'm in the story, I'm living it. Coming out of it to look something up would rarely even occur to me.
8. What are you currently reading?
About to re-read the latest Dresden Files book, which I spirited away from my store mere hours after its arrival (*flail!!!* and also JIM BUTCHER SOMETIMES YOU ARE NEARLY AS BAD AS JOSS WHEDON WHAT WITH THE WOE AND HARRYYYY! AND THOMAS! AND OH DEAR); this evening began re-reading L'Engle's A Live Coal in the Sea, which I stumbled upon at the used bookstore today; some recent reads that I was impressed by include Frances Hardinge's dizzyingly spectacular Fly By Night (seriously. people write children's books like this still? I... blimey. just... blimey. when I start my book review blog I will talk about it more extensively, but I need to re-read it first.), and in my quest to become more familiar with recent popular children's books, since the children's section is my special charge at the store, I picked up Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief and was surprised to find that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I haven't been really engrossed by a recent children's book in a while; I read them and usually like them and forget about them almost immediately, but The Lightning Thief was a fantastic rip-roaring adventure story and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series. I wish it had been written when I was a little girl obsessed with Greek mythology, because I would have adored it beyond belief then.
9. What is the last book you bought?
A Live Coal in the Sea, by Madeleine L'Engle, today at Rosie's Book Shoppe. (Um. Going to a bookstore immediately after an eye appointment that included dialating eye drops is, in retrospect, inadvisable. I swiftly become very nauseated -- and frustrated, because I had to work really hard to scan the spines for possible gems. Owwww. Drat it.) And I bought Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things mostly by accident, because I'd borrowed it from my store to read and it got caught on something in my bag and the cover tore. I don't know if Buying A Book You Damaged is actually store policy, but I always do it anyway because... it seems like the right thing to do. And it makes me feel better about having been careless. And... um... it gives me an excuse to buy a book... Anyway, short stories for the win! And the paperback edition of Fragile Things is so pretty, omg (the Amazon picture makes the green look really ugly, but it's not even remotely that shade, what on earth, Amazon?). And... let me see. I've been acquiring a lot of new books lately. Mum found me some L'Engles at Goodwill recently -- A House Like A Lotus and The Arm of the Starfish, and I found a lovely vintage hardback of Christy in near perfect condition for, what, a quarter?, and then there were the Barbara Hambly vampire novels, and I kind of end up buying every Eva Ibbotson that turns up in my store... (and plan to acquire the older harder to find ones on Amazon Marketplace or half.com in the very near future).
10. Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can read more than one at a time?
I like to be very engrossed in a book. I tend to live in them for a while. My ADHD is bad enough already! Anyway, trying to really read more than one book at once does the books involved a great disservice. When I find myself reading several books at once, I am usually very restless -- putting one book down and starting another and then deciding I don't feel like that one at the moment and going back to the first or on to another... Sometimes I may have several different kinds of books going -- some poetry and a novel and a bit of history or short stories or a memoir or a book about writing or How To Get Awesome SAT Scores (no really) or the history of bells (NO REALLY! BY JANE YOLEN EVEN!).
11. Do you like re-reading books?
wanderlight (whose birthday it was yesterday: happy birthday, Rita!), as I am eager to write more entries that do not fall into the categories of Angst! Angst! Angst! and Stuff That I Did Today. Reading habits meme! Rita told her f-list all to do it, and I extend the same eager curiousity towards you lot as well! I love hearing about how other people interact with books.1. Do you snack while you read? If so, favourite reading snack?
Surely you jest. dear interviewer? Books and food are nearly as intertwined in my psyche as Joss Whedon and character death. It isn't merely that I often find it necessary to hunt down a snack when I am doing some serious reading: it is a truth universally acknowledged that a Banui in possession of fresh-baked cookies or an apple must be in want of a book. I cannot savour food properly unless it is enjoyed in tandem with reading material. (Films or episodes of television can sometimes be substituted, but a book is still best.) I learnt to read at four, and almost immediately afterwards spent nearly every meal tucked into my chair with my knees against the table and a book propped on them. My mother kept a plastic mat underneath my chair for several years because in my book-enraptured state I would not exactly notice where my food was going. (Some of my oldest childhood favourites have distinctive food spills marking the pages. Most of my books have a smudge of chocolate or cheese or something on some page, whether or not it's immediately noticeable; rather as how every sheet I will ever own will acquire an inkstain eventually.)
As for particular favourite reading snacks: well, every Saturday on my way home from the library I stop at Hockman's Candy and purchase delicious homemade chocolates. Some choice flavours include: peppermint truffles, almond-flavoured truffles, chocolate caramels, peanut chewies (a delicious sticky gigantic mass of peanuts and caramel shelled in chocolate), peppermint chocolate chip candies, chocolate nougats (like Three Musketeers, except thick and rich and very homemade-tasting: exquisite!), chocolate-covered Oreos, chocolate-covered pretzels, sundry flavours of fudge... They know me by name there. Um... yes. But I also bake all the time: fresh cookies or cake and a book? And cold milk? And bread! Bread is my favourite snack in all the world. A mug of cocoa and a baguette and soft cheddar cheese (or rosemary olive oil bread spread with goat cheese) and an apple and some fresh cookies or cake or fudge or pie and some candles and a book and an open window: this is the most romantic and lovely atmosphere that I can create for myself.
2. Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
I can mark non-fiction books. My copies of Madeleine L'Engle's Two-Part Invention and Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz are full of underlined passages. But deliberate markings in fiction doesn't belong. It throws me straight out of the story: makes it feel like a collection of words, and not a place in which I am currently living. It makes it stop being real. It's like seeing a car in the background of a period film, or the boom dipping down into view for just a moment, or the colours wavering off. It doesn't belong.
The funny thing is that I often love books that other people have written in. Not for school, because those are often dull; I have books handed down from the children of my mother's friends with all of the adjectives underlined or the foreshadowing marked or the vocabulary words circled or what have you, and that's dead boring. But once in a while I find some stranger's notes in a secondhand book or a library book, and it fascinates me.
3. How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?
I've never really understood dog-earing. I don't want to keep a temporary place forever! And if it's an older book, and you've dog-eared it before, or if it's used and someone else has, how are you ever meant to find the one specific dog-ear that you want? I lay books flat open if I'm leaving them in one place, and use bookmarks when the book needs to go someplace (usually into my satchel) -- you know, if I can find a bookmark! But I have a lovely one that
bornofstars made me; and a green leather one my aunt bought for me in Wales bearing the legend Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwlllcharismitaine sent me some splendid ones a while back; and lady_moriel brought me back a cloth one from Turkey. They stay found better than the old cheap ones that tend to collect around the house, anyway, but I still find myself bookmarkless more often than not. Then I end up using reciepts, clothing sale tags, scraps of paper, smaller books, pens, matchsticks, ribbons, jewellery (necklaces and narrow dangley earrings make excellent emergency bookmarks!), and, um, I have used currency once or twice but I would not recommend it. 4. Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?
I'd say that my reading material is roughly seventy percent fiction, thirty percent non-fiction. The thing is, I like stories, in whatever sort of shape or format they may come: films, songs, newspaper blurbs, NPR, strangers gossipping in my store, photographs, paintings, histories -- there are stories in dictionaries, if you know where to look for them. So if a story captivates me, I'll investigate it. Most of what I own in the non-fiction department is history/biography -- Madeleine L'Engle's biographies, of course, and Robert Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra is a favourite, as characterised and engrossing as any novel -- or about languages -- I've read The Story of English about ten times, and The Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage at least four, and The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary three times, and then there are clusters of books on Anglo Saxon, and grammar, and etymology -- or about psychology -- not in the Freudian sense, but in the how-the-brain-acts-and-interacts sense, like Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, which I read straight through in an afternoon; I could not put it down. (I do not, alas, own it yet.) And then there are books about books -- I love books about books, whether fiction (Thomas Wharton's Salamander and The Logogryph; Cornelia Funke's Inkheart) or non-fiction (Library: An Unquiet History, and various books I've got from my library about different people's reading experiences, a year of reading, or the history of their life and poetry). And books on ballads and mythology and folklore! Any place where a story lies: that is where you will find me.
5. Hardcopy or audiobooks?
I cannot concentrate on audiobooks, which is sad, because I like the concept, especially when the author reads it himself and is
6. Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?
...Put books down? Only if I've read them before and know what is going to happen, and sometimes not even then. I have read books in the car, risking nausea, and while walking, and I suspect I have even read in my sleep.
7. If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away? Write it down to look it up later?
I don't... notice unfamiliar words, exactly. Nearly always I can suss out the meaning by context (or linguistic detective skills), and if it's particularly fascinating and savoury, I look it up later a) to commit it to memory, and b) to make certain that when I use it eventually I won't miss some especial shade of meaning. Anyway, there aren't very many unfamiliar words. *sheepish shrug* Anyway, when I'm reading I'm in the story, I'm living it. Coming out of it to look something up would rarely even occur to me.
8. What are you currently reading?
About to re-read the latest Dresden Files book, which I spirited away from my store mere hours after its arrival (*flail!!!* and also JIM BUTCHER SOMETIMES YOU ARE NEARLY AS BAD AS JOSS WHEDON WHAT WITH THE WOE AND HARRYYYY! AND THOMAS! AND OH DEAR); this evening began re-reading L'Engle's A Live Coal in the Sea, which I stumbled upon at the used bookstore today; some recent reads that I was impressed by include Frances Hardinge's dizzyingly spectacular Fly By Night (seriously. people write children's books like this still? I... blimey. just... blimey. when I start my book review blog I will talk about it more extensively, but I need to re-read it first.), and in my quest to become more familiar with recent popular children's books, since the children's section is my special charge at the store, I picked up Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief and was surprised to find that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I haven't been really engrossed by a recent children's book in a while; I read them and usually like them and forget about them almost immediately, but The Lightning Thief was a fantastic rip-roaring adventure story and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series. I wish it had been written when I was a little girl obsessed with Greek mythology, because I would have adored it beyond belief then.
9. What is the last book you bought?
A Live Coal in the Sea, by Madeleine L'Engle, today at Rosie's Book Shoppe. (Um. Going to a bookstore immediately after an eye appointment that included dialating eye drops is, in retrospect, inadvisable. I swiftly become very nauseated -- and frustrated, because I had to work really hard to scan the spines for possible gems. Owwww. Drat it.) And I bought Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things mostly by accident, because I'd borrowed it from my store to read and it got caught on something in my bag and the cover tore. I don't know if Buying A Book You Damaged is actually store policy, but I always do it anyway because... it seems like the right thing to do. And it makes me feel better about having been careless. And... um... it gives me an excuse to buy a book... Anyway, short stories for the win! And the paperback edition of Fragile Things is so pretty, omg (the Amazon picture makes the green look really ugly, but it's not even remotely that shade, what on earth, Amazon?). And... let me see. I've been acquiring a lot of new books lately. Mum found me some L'Engles at Goodwill recently -- A House Like A Lotus and The Arm of the Starfish, and I found a lovely vintage hardback of Christy in near perfect condition for, what, a quarter?, and then there were the Barbara Hambly vampire novels, and I kind of end up buying every Eva Ibbotson that turns up in my store... (and plan to acquire the older harder to find ones on Amazon Marketplace or half.com in the very near future).
10. Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can read more than one at a time?
I like to be very engrossed in a book. I tend to live in them for a while. My ADHD is bad enough already! Anyway, trying to really read more than one book at once does the books involved a great disservice. When I find myself reading several books at once, I am usually very restless -- putting one book down and starting another and then deciding I don't feel like that one at the moment and going back to the first or on to another... Sometimes I may have several different kinds of books going -- some poetry and a novel and a bit of history or short stories or a memoir or a book about writing or How To Get Awesome SAT Scores (no really) or the history of bells (NO REALLY! BY JANE YOLEN EVEN!).
11. Do you like re-reading books?
I always re-read books! Why do you think I own so many? (Besides the fact that, as I mentioned, I love the physical nature of books, and having shelves of them, and being able to see them and touch them and have them around.) I read them over and over and over, if they're good. I love the new things that re-reading brings out in a book -- sometimes it's just that I missed a few things here and there in the first reading (very frequently likely, as I roar through books the first time round), and sometimes it's the way things come clear, or being able to see how an author builds towards something or gives clues along the way. Sometimes -- most often -- it's just being in that place again. I really love that I was such a fluent reader as a very, very young child, because novels I read when I was six, eight, twelve: I re-read them now and they have that comfort of being old favourites, but they're also rich and rewarding to an (almost-) adult reader. Books are made to be re-read.
...And now to bed! :/
...And now to bed! :/
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-15 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-16 12:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-16 02:56 am (UTC)Or perhaps I should just say it's a joy to live in such a diverse and beautiful country.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-17 05:52 pm (UTC)Oh, by the by, I've got an album for you: Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet Live at Austin City Limits Music Festival (@http://www.mediafire.com/?fzddo1mynmz@). Just downloaded from iTunes the other day (hurrah for debit cards! -- and yes, I de-protected it!), and it's lovely, especially the cello-heavy live version of "Nobody's Fault But Mine".
And I checked your archives, and you don't seem to have The Sparrow Quartet EP (http://www.mediafire.com/?pt6ihtctu0o), either, so there's that one for you. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-04-17 10:57 pm (UTC)We do indeed have a perplexing language and it has perplexed me for many years. Wales is a small country but one (as I hinted at above) of great contrasts, both in its landscape and its culture. I suspect it might be confusing for a brief visit as it takes a while to reveal its depth, but it is certainly worth adding to your Celtic tour when you eventually make it to Killarney.
Dan
no subject
Date: 2009-04-15 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-16 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-15 09:45 pm (UTC)And books are one of the most wonderful things in the world. The end.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-16 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-18 08:27 pm (UTC)Aaaah! You've just created this atmosphere inside my head and now I want to BE there. :)
I love that you love books as physical objects. It's something I find that a lot of readers don't pay attention to, and I just don't understand that. With me it gets to the point where it's hard for me to re-read a book in a different edition from the one I read it in originally; it doesn't feel like the same book, somehow. I incorporate the physical aspects of a book (the pages, the font, the way it feels in my hands, the cover, the dedication page, etc.) into my memory of it, and it gets wrapped up in the story, and I can't separate it out.
But deliberate markings in fiction doesn't belong. It throws me straight out of the story: makes it feel like a collection of words, and not a place in which I am currently living. It makes it stop being real.
Aha! This is something I've been thinking about for a while, thank you for crystallising it for me! I realised that if a book is good, I can't stop to make marks on my first time through -- only if it's the second or third re-read -- exactly for this reason. It reminds me that the book is a book, and not reality.
I am going to write down all of your nonfic recs.
Yay book memes! ♥
no subject
Date: 2009-04-18 11:30 pm (UTC)Do you memorise where things are in a book visually? Because that's the largest problem for me re. different editions of books. I get so disoriented, because scenes I remember being on this part of the right-hand page are now somewhere else entirely, and I start to feel very... dizzy. (Also I can't find specific quotes and things that I'm looking for! :p)
Speaking of books as physical objects, THE LOGOGRYPH. I may have mentioned this before, but it is one of the most aesthetically pleasing books IN THE WORLD.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 02:32 am (UTC)YES!
I do that ALL THE TIME. It's so weird. I'll memorise spots in a library hardcover and then barely even be able to read my new shiny paperback version because it's different.
The Logogryph ♥. Thomas Wharton actually talked about its binding when I met him at his last author-talk thing. A tiny little publishing company -- Gasperau Press -- approached him post-Salamander and asked him if he'd like to do a book with them, and he basically said, "I only have scraps of ideas but YES." And thus, The Logogryph. He describes the publishing house itself as a mix of old and new: huge old printing presses mixed in with computers. I want to go there.