Areas of Unrest

13 December 2005 - Book Meme

The idea of writing 15 things about books is making the rounds and, well, it was either that or write about soup ...

1. I don't really know when I started to read, but it was some time before I started school. I do know that the first book I loved was You Will Go to the Moon. It was probably published about 1960 or 1961 and was horribly inaccurate about what eventually happened, but space was the most exciting thing I could imagine.

2. I've always tended towards series reading. I devoured many of the volumes in the Childhoods of Famous Americans series in my elementary school library, for example. I was also thoroughly addicted to Nancy Drew and to Cherry Ames and to the Dana Girls, who got to go to Thailand in one of their mysteries.

3. I also read a lot of comic books when I was growing up. They were not quite considered respectable by many parents in my neighborhood, but my folks felt that reading is good, regardless of what we read. My first introduction to a number of classics was through Classic Comics and their version of The Count of Monte Cristo was a particular favorite. I was also oddly fond of a comic book life of Enrico Fermi.

4. I've always loved mythology and folklore. I had a book of Norse myths that I read over and over, for example. I also remember reading a lot of American tall tales and I am still astonished to meet people who don't know about hoop snakes and Paul Bunyan and so on.

5. I own about 3200 books. I've been making a concerted effort to weed things out and my goal is to get down to 2500. A nearer term goal is to get rid of all the books in languages I don't understand. At least I don't own any books in languages I can't identify. .

6. In high school, we got various reading lists. Some of them were semi-required reading, meaning that each student had to pick one or two selections from the list. But I remember the library sending out a list of books for college-bound students and being convinced that I'd do terribly in college if I hadn't read everything on it. As a result, I read authors like Camus and Sartre when I was 15 or 16.

7. I dislike reading plays. This seems odd, since I'm primarily an auditory learner. I do, however, like to listen to recordings of plays. When I lived in L.A., I survived many a long drive by listening to tapes from L.A. Theatre Works.

8. One of the great pleasures in life is rereading a book I love. The books I've read the most often are Alice in Wonderland and Catcher in the Rye.

9. I tend to read less when I travel. I read books on airplanes, but I find that I either watch television or just read guidebooks (and the free tourist literature) in hotels. Despite that, I try to pick my vacation reading to be suitable to the destination. For example, I read An Instance of the Fingerpost in Venice and The Salaryman's Wife in Japan.

10. Speaking of travel, one of the things I try to buy when on vacation is a book of folktales. One of my more amusing purchases was a book I found in the Tuvan Museum - which turned out to have been published in Seattle!

11. I keep a book journal, in which I write anything from a paragraph to a few pages about each book I read. Simple lists don't interest me, but the journal forces me to think about what I read.

12. If I give somebody a book as a gift, I usually read it first. I feel vaguely guilty about that, but not guilty enough to stop doing it. I'm pretty sure my mother and brother know I do this, but I'm not sure that friends do. (I suppose they do now!)

13. My favorite genre of fiction is mysteries. While I read them in elementary school, I didn't for years and years, until I found a copy of Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers for 19 cents on a discount table my junior year of college. For that price I'll read damn near anything and Sayers completely hooked me.

14. Speaking of college, I did my humanities concentration (an MIT requirement, meaning four classes in one field) in world literature in translation. That gave me an excuse to read novels. The most memorable class I took was "Evil and Decadence in Literature."

15. My major reading these days is on the metro. I can get through a typical book (say, a mystery) in two or three days commute time. Part of the reason I read fast was having been forced to take speed-reading in junior high, when my school district did away with foreign languages. Sometimes I wish I read slower and sometimes I wish I had the time to read every book ever written.