I will use all the interesting tags I find regardless of whether I'm tagged specifically or generally. I found this one here.
1. What book has been on your shelf the longest?
For fiction, probably the three tiny Barnes and Noble books I bought ages ago of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Ivanhoe. How I wish I’d snatched up more, but I didn’t know all the books they had at that point in my life. I did find The Secret Garden at Goodwill a couple years ago. I wish Barnes and Noble would put those out again.
For all times, excluding Bibles, Good Housekeeping’s the Illustrated Book of Needlecrafts. I used that so often in the earlier knitting days before I discovered reams of stitches and aids online.
2. What is your current read, your last read, and the book you’ll read next?
My last read was the second book of ND Wilson's Outlaws of Time: The Song of Glory and Ghost. I'm still reading Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, and I'm also reading Dombey and Son (I just picked up where I left off months ago, and thankfully, the book starting to pick up in interest at that point). As to what I will read next, well, I am a bit random and moody in my reading. I have mostly reference books and history books, but A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Habib Hourani and Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution are my priority. I have a Georgette Heyer novel, but I might have to make a quickie run to the library or raid my sisters' shelves or something for some fiction to help me finish my nonfiction (yes, that is how that works).
3. What book did everyone like, but you hated?
4. What book do you keep telling yourself you'll read, but you probably won't?
Many books on my Classic Club list. Except I’ve now pretty much decided not to force myself on some of them.
5. What book are you saving for retirement?
Anything I’m not motivated to read now that I might be interested in then.
6. Last page: read it first, or wait 'til the end? Wait for the end!
If I’m enjoying the book, then I try to wait until the end. But if I’m not and decided not to finish reading, then I will skim the rest.
7. Acknowledgement: waste of paper and ink, or interesting aside?
Boring, although I like looking for the author’s family at the end.
8. Which book character would you switch places with?
Maybe Nell, in Lantern Bearers, so I could marry Aquila and experience ancient Britain.
9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life? (Place, time, person?)
Well, the books from my grandparents’ collection that I got after they downsized or that they gave to me earlier remind me of their old library (it was a bedroom that had a glass door; they had a computer in it, and they had a full bookshelf, a double full bookshelf, and three half bookshelves, or something like that plus boxes of books in the closet). I got several of the books I’d only ever read there (Mother was a gift, but Old-Fashioned Girl and At Boarding School with the Tucker Twins* I got to take), but there are a few for which I wish I’d remembered to ask (To Have and to Hold and A Long Fatal Love Chase). And I wonder what happened to their Bobbsey twin books?
10. Name a book that you acquired in an interesting way.
I think the above is interesting because two of the books are antique copies, but another interesting one is that my grandmother bought me a book about regency times at a JA festival and the author signed it.
11. Have you ever given a book away for a special reason to a special person?
No.
12. Which book has been with you most places?
I didn’t personally own most of my books when I was younger. Maybe my American Girl books. Although I gave them to my sisters (or they appropriated them) after I got older.
13. Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad later?
I didn’t have too much required classic reading. And I loved a lot of the historical fiction we were assigned.
14. Used or brand new?
If used is like bran' new, then both, if not, then bran' new.
15. Have you ever read a Dan Brown book?
No.
16. Have you ever seen a movie you liked more than the book?
The Inheritance by Louisa May Alcott (and I watched the movie first, but the book is silly)
17. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks included?
I like reading about the different food although I'm not sure it would make me hungry. L.M. Montgomery often mentions food that sounds quite delicious.
18. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?
Um, no one? I'll try what I think interesting of many people's recommendations, but I don't implicitly trust to like all any one person's suggestions. Everyone has different tastes, even my sisters although I may take their advice more seriously than I would other people . . . even though the advice may be “you wouldn’t like it.”
19. Is there a book out of your comfort zone (e.g., outside your usual reading genre) that you ended up loving?
No, I don’t think so. I don’t know how to define out of my comfort zone . . . if I start liking it, then it IS in my comfort zone. Books that seem different or unusual in subject or style, like The Outsiders and Book Thief, might be easier for me to answer. And I just did. Books that I consider out of my comfort zone would fall into genres I invariably dislike or at least feel somewhat indifferent toward, e.g. Science Fiction.
*I love most of this book, but be forewarned I had to eliminate some pages because of MAJOR racist language and issues (none of this is remotely integral to the story, not the main theme like in say The Deerstalker or something).
Labels: Bookish, Tags