borrowed, bought, given 2012

booksbooksbooks

i usually reserve this post until the very last days of december, just in case i finish reading a book at the last minute. but i doubt if i’ll pick up another book this week; let alone read it as ferociously as a rabid dog.

none of these books were borrowed or given. all of these i bought at — where else? — booksale. i love that store! i could go in broke and come out even broke-r, if there is such a word. i’d rather starve than pass up the opportunity to buy second-hand books at really low prices. especially if i find one with the oprah label. i like oprah’s taste when it comes to books. but, of course, i don’t just blindly buy whatever she recommends. i read the synopsis. after which, i read the first two or three lines of the first chapter. i’m kind of partial to the tone of the narrator’s voice. i can’t explain it but i always look for the lines that would, you know, draw me in. doesn’t matter how. they just have to intrigue the hell out of me.

and no, i don’t like books with highfalutin words. i’m not exactly proud of my range of vocabulary. i find it exasperating when authors show off just how many fancy words they can dish out in a single paragraph and i’m there wondering what the hell all of them means. i want communication. i want the characters to speak to me in a way that i can appreciate and understand. like a personal conversation with a friend instead of a supposedly therapeutic one with a shrink.

because, really, isn’t that what reading should be all about?

13 thoughts on “borrowed, bought, given 2012

    1. i know it seems like a lot but i kind of have this tendency to skim. and some of the books there are fit for grade-schoolers so… hehe.

  1. nice ni tanan jan? 😀 this year i havent bought any book 😦 but i bought a kindle and im a happier bookworm – although lahi ra jud kung libro imong hawiran 😀

    1. not all of them is nice, lars, although i did enjoy reading all of them. by “nice,” i mean, you know, something that goes on my gushing-because-it’s-my-favorite list. but they are all okay. i would’ve stopped reading them a quarter of the way if i found them too boring to waste my time on. hehe.

      some of the books here that made it on my list are the following:
      ♦ suite francaise — a very beautiful read about the war. this one definitely had me gushing!
      ♦ the middle place — the author is just so funny you can’t help but love her.
      ♦ five quarters of the orange — nicely written
      ♦ slammerkin
      ♦ so big
      ♦ back roads
      ♦ the confessions of max tivoli — kind of like that brad pitt movie where he ages in reverse
      ♦ the book of ruth

      okay, daghan-daghan sad diay ko ug favorites dinhi. hehehe.

  2. Jan, equal na jud atong reading numbers. Hehe. Speaking of vocabulary, I would not recommend Nabokov to you. Hehe. That guy’s Russian but his English can beat even Hemingway. Is Jewel good? I have it. Got it from – where else – Booksale. Hehe. I put it on the bottom shelf (my designated back shelf) for books I may read after 10 years or may never read or may just give away. About Oprah, I never trusted that label after reading Joyce Carol Oates (an author unknown to me at the time) just because of it.

    1. i’d probably give “jewel” a 5. or maybe a 6. you’re not missing anything much if you fail to read it. “suite francaise,” though, is beautiful! or maybe that’s just me. i kind of have this affinity for novels about the war. i have yet to read “anne frank’s diary.” for some reason, i haven’t found one yet at booksale. hehe.

      thank you for the nabokov advice, whoever that guy is. hahaha. we wouldn’t want to risk a cerebral aneurysm now, do we? lol. the heavy readings, i leave to you. then i’ll just read your summaries over at your blog. =D

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 )

Connecting to %s
https://thepausesbetween.com/2012/12/23/borrowed-bought-given-2012/
thepausesbetween.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-27
125698
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:CUPXPENY5LBVHMVLNDOT2GTKJ6HWP3DU
<urn:uuid:a66f887d-555a-49fc-9535-f8548797ca6f>
2022-06-24T23:14:15Z
192.0.78.24
text/html
sha1:3MZXFJD6CKEPAHKJ5CMQEO7VN2UWLLIH
<urn:uuid:9487615c-e96e-4631-97fe-d8be58786147>
https://thepausesbetween.com/2012/12/23/borrowed-bought-given-2012/
response
<urn:uuid:f2fedb31-4eba-44f6-80ac-1e62fff89fae>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-27
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June/July 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-163
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.3-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/