Slump

So this is what a reading slump feels like. Totally bored with what I'm reading? Check. Finding other things to do rather than return to said book? Check. Reading my email or playing solitaire at lunch rather than reading? Check. Staring at massive pile of TBR books and not feeling inspired to pick any up? Check.

I expect this will last until the weekend, when I have time to go to the library or a bookstore. In the meantime, it will be a bit quiet around here.

BBAW: Reading Meme

Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?
I read while I'm eating dinner all the time, but I don't normally snack while I read.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
It horrifies me a little, though college probably cured me of that, mostly. No, I just rarely have a need to note anything in the book I'm reading.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?
Usually, I use the receipt for the book as a bookmark. I love to pull a book off the shelf and find the old receipt, or some other marker that tells me where the book came from. It always brings back a good memory!

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?
Both - mostly fiction, but I also like quirky memoirs, food books, and popular history.

Hard copy or audiobooks?
Hard copy. When my husband and I were first dating, we lived 5 hours away from each other by car for a year. I made that drive dozens of times and I couldn't have done it without audiobooks. I don't think I've listened to a single one since, though.

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?
Unless my eyes are closing from exhaustion, I always read to the end of the chapter - or the section break, at least.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?
No.

What are you currently reading?
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.

What is the last book you bought?
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. It is my next book club book.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?
I prefer to read multiple books at the same time. I especially like to mix it up - a nonfiction history and a YA fantasy, or an Agatha Christie mystery and a memoir.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?
Between the hours of 7 am and 11 pm, 7 days a week. Favorite place is my (new king size!) bed, with my husband nearby, also reading. Heaven.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?
I do tend to read a lot of series, and I think that's because if I like a character, I like getting to know them over time. Stand alone books are good, but series are a real draw for me. But I don't like it when series go on too long (15 books is too much, for example), as I just think the quality goes down.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. It's just fascinating and funny. I'm also surprised when I meet someone who watches his show but has never read his books.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)
By however they will fit on our poor, cramped bookshelves!

The Literary Geek Meme

I've seen this meme in several places, but recently I was tagged for it on Facebook. I figured it was worth posting my answers here as well.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Agatha Christie (see question #2) followed by Gary Gygax. (I married a nerd, what can I say?) Not counting my husband's books, I'd say my #2 is Margaret Frazer. I collect both of her series.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
There are 80-something books in our LT library that we own multiple copies of. Some are actually multiple editions of the same book (mostly textbooks) but many are due to overlaps in my husband and I's taste. For example, we both collected Agatha Christie books for a while, so we have duplicates of almost all her books. And we don't get rid of anything.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
No.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Edward Cullen. HA! Just kidding! Hell would freeze over first. I'm not secretly in love with anyone.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
Alanna by Tamora Pierce, probably. Or from the Chronicles of Narnia, The Horse and His Boy.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
See #5.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I can't think of anything truly awful, really, that I finished. I did read Twilight and New Moon, which are terrible in some ways but impossible to put down. I did abandon two; Roanoke: A Novel of Elizabethan Intrigue by Margaret Lawrence comes to mind first.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Just one? Old Man's War was fantastic, as was Never Let Me Go. The Hunger Games was so much fun. The Mote in God's Eye was great.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
I don't think I would, but I have been encouraging (pushing) the books in #8 on my friends. I have also, in the past, recommended Ender's Gam and, more recently, Old Man's War to many people, including those who swear an aversion to sci-fi. That's just because you don't know what you are missing, people.
10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
Uh, someone smart? Ask my sister, she knows these kinds of things.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
I can't wait for the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie to come out!

12) What book would you -least- like to see made into a movie?
Most of them, really. I'm usually very wary when my favorite books are made into movies.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I can't think of any.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
There are too many to count: I have very lowbrow tastes. Hence all the SF, YA, murder mysteries, etc. I don't like Romance, though, usually, as I don't like reading about sex.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
In grad school, I read a fair amount of architectural and post-modern theory, most of which is pretty difficult to get through.

16) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
They're all pretty great, but I know Shakespeare best. Unless we're not talking about in translation, because there's no way I'm reading Middle English.

17) Austen or Eliot?
Who? Just kidding! Kind of. I've never read Austen and I've only read Eliot's poetry, so I'm not sure I can compare.

18) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
See #17, I guess.

19) What is your favorite novel?
Again, too many to name.

20) Play?
I'm more of a musical theatre gal, myself (I can pretty much sing Guys & Dolls, West Side Story and Oklahoma! in their entirety), so I don't feel qualified to answer.

21) Short story?
Is The Awakening by Kate Chopin a novella or short story?

22) Work of non-fiction?
Favorite? Its so hard to choose these things. I love a lot of non-fiction, actually. Kitchen Confidential, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan... I bet I could go on. (I just noticed - there sure are a lot of food books in there, and I didn't even include any cookbooks.)

23) Who is your favorite writer?
All this choosing! Who can decide? CS Lewis, Tamora Pierce, Scott Westerfeld, Agatha Christie, Margaret Frazer, Robert Heinlein, John Scalzi, etc.

24) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I don't know. Stephanie Meyer?

25) What is your desert island book?
Probably something by Heinlein - before I started blogging, I tended to be a pretty big re-reader, and it was not uncommon for me to read Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love every year.

26) And ... what are you reading right now?
The Book of Unholy Mischief: A Novel by Elle Newmark. Its quite good, so far.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a link to your answers in the comments.

Reading Coincidences

I read a couple of posts recently about finding interesting correlations between different books. Rebecca at The Book Lady's Blog called these mental connections a Daisy Chain. It was really interesting for me to read about other bloggers thinking about this, because it was really on my mind while I read The Thirteenth Tale (review). I was reading The Well of Lost Plots at the same time (see my review here), which is the opposite of The Thirteenth Tale in so many ways. Well is one of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books - it is about as silly and light as you can get. In sharp contrast, The Thirteenth Tale is gothic and spooky and sad. But rather than dwell on their differences, I kept finding all the things that they had in common.

There are some superficial things that are easy to see in common about these books. Both are set in England, both owe a huge debt to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, both feature a female protagonist solving a mystery.

At a deeper level, though, both of these books, to me, are about storytelling and how an author creates a book. In The Thirteenth Tale, Vida Winter is a famous author who drew from her own life to create the characters in her books. For books created within Fforde's world, writing is a mysterious process that involves characters with minds of their own and contraptions we never see. But I think that in the end, both of these books address that, for all its apparent simplicity, writing is a mystery to even the most devoted readers.

What do you think? Am I reading too much into these two books?

Dewey's 24-hour Read-a-Thon

Tomorrow is Dewey's 24-Hour Read-a-Thon, an annual event where book bloggers pledge to read for 24-hours (plus or minus) straight, blog about it and, usually, donate to a charity of their choice. I'm not planning on being a Reader, but I am looking forward to hearing about everyone else's exploits. If you'd like to follow along or find out more, visit the Read-a-Thon website.

Speed Reader

I happened to see Monday's Musing Mondays question at the same time I was thinking about speed reading, so I thought I'd put it altogether and write about my thoughts here.

When reading do you read every word? Do you ever skip chapters or skim over parts?

I read fast. Okay, not as fast as some people (S. Krishna, I'm looking at you!), but faster than most. I always read fast as a kid. During English class, when we'd read out loud, I was always getting in trouble for not paying attention, not knowing when it was my turn. The truth was that I wasn't daydreaming, I was reading ahead. At first, my teachers would be annoyed but usually, once they realized that my comprehension was as good as (if not better than) most of my classmates, they'd get over it. Pretty soon, I'd finish the book and pull out the next one.


Years later, I heard a talk on speed reading and I realized that that was what I had unconsciously been doing all along. The method the speaker described involved scanning a page to identify key points, then going back and filling in the gaps, but paying particular attention to the first and last sentences in a paragraph, people's/character's names and other words that appear important. I tend to read an entire block of text at a time, rather than word by word. All of this happens faster than I can think about it, though. At the end of a page, I've read every word but have paid more attention to some. This does mean that sometimes I will miss inflection, as I may not read all the words on a page in the order they were written, but that's rare.

What's the upshot of this? Not much. The only thing I've ever really been able to identify as a problem is that I have a very hard time reading poetry. When I hear poetry, I understand it fine, but the words in a poem are meant to be read in a certain order, so I can't really do it.

Are any of you speed readers? Did you learn to do it intentionally or did you, like me, naturally start reading that way?

To Kindle or Not to Kindle? (Updated)

My husband is seriously considering buying the new Kindle. Do any of you have the original Kindle or another e-reader? What do you think? I'd love to get some feedback before we plop down the money.

Visit the Kindle 2 page on Amazon here.

Update: Here are some articles about the Kindle that might be interesting -

CNET's review of the original Kindle
Gizmodo's take on the Kindle 2
Nathan Bransford's praise of the Sony Reader (Which, like Jen of Devourer of Books I have played with at Border's and been very impressed by.)

Reading Quiz

Thanks to S. Krishna for the idea!

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader   You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Adult Reading is up

Here are two takes on the new study from the National for the Arts, saying that fiction reading has increased in 2008, after years of declines, one from the New York Times and one from Jacket Copy.

Update: and another one from NPR's MonkeySee blog.

Happy New Year!

Yes, I know I am quite late to the party on this one. It's still early enough in the year that I can get away with it, though, I think.

Just about every book blog I read has been doing some sort of end of 2008 wrap-up and/or looking forward to 2009 post. I think it's a great idea to recount just what books I read in 2008 and what my favorites were. Unfortunately, since I only started blogging in August (I think, and I'm being too lazy to look it up), I have no idea what I read for the first 8 months of the year. And even then, I don't review or comment on every book I read (I figure that my thoughts on Twilight are probably not going to be the one thing that finally makes you say, yes! I will read the much exposed/hyped vampire teen angst book!). Maybe this year, I will keep track. But probably not. It just seems like so much work.

As for my 2009 book and blogging resolutions, I have only one, which I am sure I will break in about two weeks, give or take: No more ambitious plans to read massive tomes on architecture, which while they are very good, are very intimidating and too big to fit in my purse, therefore never get read in a timely manner.

Anyway, thanks to all of you who made my first (calendar) year blogging so fantastic. I hope 2009 is a wonderful year, full of great books, for all of you.

Fun Author Tool

I discovered a new, fun little tool online (sorry, but I can't remember who I found it from!). Its the Literature Map and it creates a map/chart of authors. According the web site, "the closer two writers are, the more likely someone will like both of them." Above is a screen shot of the map for Italo Calvino (one of my favorite authors). I get why Jorge Luis Borges is nearby, but I'm less clear on how James Frey ended up so close as well. Unfortunately, there's no explanation of the methodology that I could find, which is a little annoying. Then again, we're not trying to solve the world's problems, just to find a good book, so I guess that's okay!

Banned Book Week

Just a reminder that this is the American Library Association's Banned Book Week (until October 4th). From the ALA, here is the list of the Top 10 Frequently Challenged Books:

1) “And Tango Makes Three,” by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
2) "The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier
3) “Olive’s Ocean,” by Kevin Henkes

4) “The Golden Compass,” by Philip Pullman
5) “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain
6) “The Color Purple,” by Alice Walker
7) "TTYL,” by Lauren Myracle
8) "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by Maya Angelou
9) “It’s Perfectly Normal,” by Robie Harris
10) "The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky

Go out and read one today!

Visit Devourer of Books for some great banned books posters! The image above is from an article in The Catholic Register regarding a Catholic school district banning The Golden Compass for its "aetheistic ideology."

Reading

For Book Bloggers Appreciation week, My Friend Amy posed several questions for book bloggers to answer, including this one: How many hours a week do you spend on reading?

I try to read books for about an hour or 2 a day. That includes about a half hour in the morning, plus maybe an hour before bed. And I usually squeeze in 5 or 10 minutes here or there over the course of the day. I'm notorious for just pulling out a book anywhere, anytime to squeeze in a few minutes of a good book. Then, on the weekends, I'll read for a few hours everyday. I used to read almost non-stop, though. Life gets in the way, though.

How about you? How many hours do you read a week?

Painting by Jean-Honore Fragonard.