Fifteen things about me and books


“15 Things About Me and Books”  is a meme moving slowly across the biblioblogosphere started by John Scalzi in 2005.  I’ve seen it done by Steve Lawson, Michael Sauers, Jenica Rogers, Iris Jastram, and Angel Rivera.  Now it’s my turn.

1.  The first book I read on my own as a child was about cats.  I read it at my grandparents’ apartment in Brooklyn.  It started with cats in Egypt.  It also had a page about how cats like to sleep on top of books.  My cat demonstrated by laying down on this book.

2. I never read a lot of the children’s classics as a child (for example – Where the Wild Things Are, The Phantom Tollbooth, Winnie the Pooh, Make Way for Ducklings, Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, A Wrinkle in Time, many more).  From an early age I was interested in reading about history and specifically biographies of colonial and early American figures.  To this day I read more non-fiction than fiction.

3.  I did read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books twice, with the exception of Farmer Boy which I wasn’t interested in at all.

4.  It always annoyed me when TV shows had a kid reading a book and that kid suddenly appears in the book participating in the action.  Reading was never like that for me and I always thought I was doing something wrong.  I still think they need a way to illustrate imagination in a way that works for more literal-minded children.

5. Defying the stereotype of librarians and bibliophiles, I’ve made a conscious effort to not collect lots of books in my own home.  I strive to check out books I can from the library.  The only books I own are reference books, gifts, books by people I know, and books I could not get through a library.  When I finish a book I give it away.  It helps that I live in Boston with access to all the Boston Public Libraries, the Minuteman Library Network and the Harvard Libraries. Of course with my wife’s books and son’s books, the house is still cluttered with books, but imagine how much more so it would be if I weren’t so disciplined.

6.  I was an anti-audiobook snob for a long time.  I listened to one for the first time in 2007 and now I listen to them regularly especially while doing processing work in the archives.

7. In order to remember the books I read I started keeping a list in the back of my journal in 1990.  Around 2000, that list became a spreadsheet.  In 2003, I started writing summary reviews of every book I read.  In 2006, I started publishing those reviews on this blog.  In 2008, I entered every book I’ve ever read* into LibraryThing.  To date I’ve reviewed 292 books on this blog and 765 books on LibraryThing (making me the 58th most prolific reviewer). Last year I ranked my 100 Favorite Books of All Time, although the list ended up having 125 books because I included series under one title.

8. I rarely reread books although I’m going to make a conscious effort to reread my 100 favorites starting this year.

8. When I was in high school I thought I would become a novelist & short story writer when I grew up.  To date I still have not written any books.

9.  The longest book I’ve ever read was Les Miserables by Victor Hugo which was over 1200 pages in the edition I read.  Surprisingly I read it in only 12 days, devouring it during a family vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

10.  In college when struggling with a difficult assignment for my physics course I reached a point of stress where I tossed the textbook out the window.  It landed with a resounding boom that echoed off the neighboring buildings.  Tension relieved, I retrieved the book and finished up the assignment in 15 minutes and went to bed.

11.  Since 2003, I’ve been trying to read a novel (in English translation) by an author from every country in the world.  I call it Around the World for a Good Book.

12. Second semester senior year I took 3 English literature courses and a history course based on Southern writers and had to buy something like 25 volumes of fiction.  Instead of going to the bookstore I went to the local book exchange and picked up paperbacks and ended up spending less than $20 for the semester.

13. For much of my life I could spend hours looking through The World Almanac and Book of Facts, staying up late learning things.  Now I surf the web.  There’s something lost and something gained.

14. In the winter of 1997 during a temporary layoff from Colonial Williamsburg I worked at the college bookstore at William & Mary.  It was the only retail-type I ever had and it was relatively relaxing but I wouldn’t want to do it again.  I loved the special dollies designed the carry the books around for shelving.

15. People sometimes make fun of me for reading too much.  I feel I can never read enough.

About these ads

2 responses to this post.

  1. Posted by Megan Quinlan on 29 April 2010 at 9:59 am

    Great post, Liam! When I was a kid, I read more than anyone I knew. However, I also did not read a lot of the “classics” (I’m thinking more CS Lewis and Tolkien) that many of my current friends treasured as kids. I can’t put my finger on the reason, but I still cannot get into Tolkien. I would however, like to read the Little House series. It’s really hard for me to say what makes me get into a book – I also read mostly non-fiction, but I really loved Harry Potter (for years after they came out, I refused to read them, much like i refuse to read Stephanie Meyers or whatever her name is. Mostly because I still have the bad attitude that anything popular is crap! Still, I will never read about teenage vampires). I was also an audiobook snob – I felt like listening to a book for some reason just wasn’t the same as reading it -but when I was in nursing school, I found a book I wanted to read on tape at the library (Plainsong by Kent Haruf). I borrowed it and listened while driving back and forth to school, then found that Alan Rickman narrated The Return of the Native so I got that just to listen to his voice and really enjoyed it. Recently, I downloaded Game Change about the ’08 election and listened to that because I was just too tired to read. When I had more energy, I found that I could knit while listening which was really fun. Now, I feel like listening is like having someone tell me a story. I also happen to be an aural learner, if that makes any sense. I am more likely to remember things I hear rather than read. I definitely don’t read as much as I like to, or as much as my friends, most of whom have degrees in English!

    Reply

  2. For me the thing that made me listen more audiobooks is when I started commuting to work with Peter and lost my “reading time” on the T. Now I use work time to make up for that.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 985 other followers

%d bloggers like this:
https://othemts.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/fifteen-things-about-me-and-books/
othemts.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
96622
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:6RSWASR3I5YZHZYB2ZV3QQTPNLCYTV3U
<urn:uuid:b1b740aa-bb26-4d78-88a1-853c7ed494ff>
2014-04-24T02:40:04Z
66.155.11.238
sha1:FTH2WQ6SGYSMW6KAX4DTVD6CXPJX7EW4
<urn:uuid:1bee7ad9-f893-468e-b37d-9564f978442e>
https://othemts.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/fifteen-things-about-me-and-books/
length
response
<urn:uuid:c1dad93e-4157-4053-8c1b-6c566bafa2a2>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf