Fifteen things about books
Mon, Dec. 12th, 2005 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterIt's fifteen things about books! How could I possibly not do this?
Also, I adore reading everyone else's version of this meme, because there's so often that "Me too!" of recognition when I thought I was the only oneneurotic bibliophilic enough to do it. (I have a lot of neurotic habits.)
1. I may be making this up: I think the first word I learned how to read was "cup," when I was in kindergarten. I remember looking at the letters C-U-P and looking at the picture of a teacup on a saucer and the proverbial lightbulb going off in my head as I realized that the letters meant the thing in the picture. I was also obsessed with Helen Keller and reread the kid version of her biography incessantly. I now associate the scene where Helen realizes that Ann Sullivan spelling out "water" in sign language under running water from the pump outdoors with C-U-P = cup. Unlike most people here, I didn't actually learn to read at a very early age, probably because my mom said I had to go to ESL classes in kindergarten and preschool.
2. I'm not sure if this is true, but it's how I remember it. The last night I spent in Colorado, before moving to Taiwan, I spent huddled in the empty living room with a stack of library books next to me. I was desperately trying to finish them before we had to return them, and I was on a mass market paperback of Egyptian myths (the cover was pale blue) when we had to go. I never got to finish the book.
3. I read about a hundred pages an hour. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but it's a handy number, because that's how I measure airplane trips. We would go to America every summer from Taiwan, which was at least a twelve-hour plane ride, so I would have to have 1200 pages of book on me. I used to never be able to sleep on planes, and the movies were never cartoons. I would just read and read and read till the lights were out and everyone was sleeping and the air was buzzing and stale and it felt like no one in the world existed but me with my book.
4. Whenever I'm stressed out, I tend to gravitate toward bookstores or libraries. I don't have to buy anything. I just like standing around all the books and knowing that there are shelves and shelves, all full, ahead of me, behind me, around me.
5. I read about two books actively at the same time, but I will have anything between two to fifteen books lying around being read inactively (aka, I stopped a while back, but haven't given up on them yet). I can only read certain books when I'm in a certain mood, and since my mood changes fairly frequently, I get hankerings to read different books all the time. I just switch off every so often. I stopped finishing every single book I read a while back, so I don't feel pressure to finish, though I've been trying to more diligently since I started keeping track. This is why it's generally useless telling me to read a book (as opposed to a general rec), because unless I'm in the mood for it, I won't start it.
6. I think I'm still buying books like mad from a lifetime of never having enough. Living in Taiwan wasn't conducive to buying many books, so every summer vacation when we went to America, I would come home with about ten mass markets in my suitcase. My mom would never understand why I spent so much money on books. Also, they weighed down the luggage. These ten or so books had to be selected with great care, because they would last me the whole year, and I wasn't allowed to touch them until I got home. I could buy a special one or two for the airplane, but those also couldn't be touched. (I borrowed books from the library and read books in the bookstores all through the summer.) In college, I could buy books all year round, but because I moved in and out of dorms every year, I never let myself accumulate many. I still had more books than most people, though, because I lugged all 28 volumes of Rurouni Kenshin and my entire set of Sandman to the States for company. Selling back books at the end of the year was always heart-breaking.
7. I got my first library card when I was around seven, and I was so proud of having something with my name on it that I kept it through high school (I think I still have it somewhere). I had a school library card in Taiwan, and thankfully, one of the English teachers donated a lot of her old genre books to the library. I didn't have a card to the university libraries, so I would beg my mom to let me sit there for three or four hours on weekends, where I would devour romances. I would borrow my cousin's library card when we spent summers with her, and I made my aunt mail me something when we rented an apartment for the summer in California, just so I would have a mailing address to give to the Cupertino library. I never used my university library card for fun reading, but the public library was a few blocks down the street. They moved it my senior year, but thankfully, by then I was dating the boy, who had a car and was roped into many library runs. When I first moved here, one of the first things I did was look up where the libraries were. I currently have library cards to three separate library systems here. The best thing about where I currently live is that the library is not even a block away, right across the street.
8. Because I never had enough books in Taiwan, I reread everything I owned, multiple times. It got to the point where I would go through the shelves and remember which parts of the book I didn't want to reread while I was picking what to read next. Today, I have so many unread books that they probably fill two bookshelves, but this only makes me feel a little secure and a lot more greedy.
9. I used to always have a book on me, just in case I got bored, got stuck, had nothing better to do, etc. I would read during my parents' dinners with their friends right at the table (I still get "Oh, I remember you! You're the kid who always had a book at the table!" from people). I tried to read during class, book hidden under my desk, and got caught enough so that I stopped. One of my friends taught herself to read and go down stairs, but I was too clumsy for that (I tried to, though). If I didn't have a book, I would read signs, cereal boxes, instructions, anything. I'm a little more social now, but I'll get caught in a situation every month or so where I'll regret not having a book in my purse. Sitting and staring into space when I could be reading seems unnatural.
10. School projects that involved the encyclopedia would inevitably take twice the amount of time that they normally would, because I would look something up and then spend the next three hours reading through all the "interesting" encyclopedia entries. I also used to read my mom's mass-market dictionary of medical terms from Time-Life, which is probably why I am somewhat hypochondriac and am interested in plagues, diseases and epidemics.
11. When my family first got an internet connection, the first thing I did was get online to try and look up things to read. I was sorely disappointed that people didn't post entire books online. Then I found fanfic. The first book I got from Amazon was Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, except I thought it was by Terry Brooks. It turns out Brooks only wrote the introduction (I was in a Terry Brooks thing). I only bought it because Geocities gave me a $5 gift certificate and the book was $4.99. Shipping to Taiwan was horrendously expensive and I vowed never to do it again. The next year, I ended up accumulating half of Sandman off Amazon (the other half I scrounged for in local bookstores). Now the internet enables me to get loads and loads of book recs, which makes me very, very happy.
12. I was once afraid that working at a bookstore would mean that I would get sick of books, which was something that I couldn't imagine. I shouldn't have been scared. Working at a bookstore only served to increase my list of books to read exponentially.
13. I grew up in a family that both encouraged reading and didn't. My mom claims that I read so much because she would read to me for hours when I was little. My dad always read thrillers and business books, and I remember giving him a cork pin cut in the shape of a book, with "The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy" written on the front. But what I mostly remember are scenes of my parents constantly telling me to get my nose out of a book, that I would ruin my eyesight, that I should go out and play more. While both of my parents read non-fiction and literature, I was introduced to genre by friends and random books in the school library.
14. It's probably rather rude for people who don't love books, but the first thing I do when I visit someone's house is gravitate toward the bookshelves, after which I make a survey of what they like to read and how the books are organized and how many there are.
15. I used to think I was well read. Then I found LJ. (This is, by the way, a very good thing.)
Also, I adore reading everyone else's version of this meme, because there's so often that "Me too!" of recognition when I thought I was the only one
1. I may be making this up: I think the first word I learned how to read was "cup," when I was in kindergarten. I remember looking at the letters C-U-P and looking at the picture of a teacup on a saucer and the proverbial lightbulb going off in my head as I realized that the letters meant the thing in the picture. I was also obsessed with Helen Keller and reread the kid version of her biography incessantly. I now associate the scene where Helen realizes that Ann Sullivan spelling out "water" in sign language under running water from the pump outdoors with C-U-P = cup. Unlike most people here, I didn't actually learn to read at a very early age, probably because my mom said I had to go to ESL classes in kindergarten and preschool.
2. I'm not sure if this is true, but it's how I remember it. The last night I spent in Colorado, before moving to Taiwan, I spent huddled in the empty living room with a stack of library books next to me. I was desperately trying to finish them before we had to return them, and I was on a mass market paperback of Egyptian myths (the cover was pale blue) when we had to go. I never got to finish the book.
3. I read about a hundred pages an hour. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but it's a handy number, because that's how I measure airplane trips. We would go to America every summer from Taiwan, which was at least a twelve-hour plane ride, so I would have to have 1200 pages of book on me. I used to never be able to sleep on planes, and the movies were never cartoons. I would just read and read and read till the lights were out and everyone was sleeping and the air was buzzing and stale and it felt like no one in the world existed but me with my book.
4. Whenever I'm stressed out, I tend to gravitate toward bookstores or libraries. I don't have to buy anything. I just like standing around all the books and knowing that there are shelves and shelves, all full, ahead of me, behind me, around me.
5. I read about two books actively at the same time, but I will have anything between two to fifteen books lying around being read inactively (aka, I stopped a while back, but haven't given up on them yet). I can only read certain books when I'm in a certain mood, and since my mood changes fairly frequently, I get hankerings to read different books all the time. I just switch off every so often. I stopped finishing every single book I read a while back, so I don't feel pressure to finish, though I've been trying to more diligently since I started keeping track. This is why it's generally useless telling me to read a book (as opposed to a general rec), because unless I'm in the mood for it, I won't start it.
6. I think I'm still buying books like mad from a lifetime of never having enough. Living in Taiwan wasn't conducive to buying many books, so every summer vacation when we went to America, I would come home with about ten mass markets in my suitcase. My mom would never understand why I spent so much money on books. Also, they weighed down the luggage. These ten or so books had to be selected with great care, because they would last me the whole year, and I wasn't allowed to touch them until I got home. I could buy a special one or two for the airplane, but those also couldn't be touched. (I borrowed books from the library and read books in the bookstores all through the summer.) In college, I could buy books all year round, but because I moved in and out of dorms every year, I never let myself accumulate many. I still had more books than most people, though, because I lugged all 28 volumes of Rurouni Kenshin and my entire set of Sandman to the States for company. Selling back books at the end of the year was always heart-breaking.
7. I got my first library card when I was around seven, and I was so proud of having something with my name on it that I kept it through high school (I think I still have it somewhere). I had a school library card in Taiwan, and thankfully, one of the English teachers donated a lot of her old genre books to the library. I didn't have a card to the university libraries, so I would beg my mom to let me sit there for three or four hours on weekends, where I would devour romances. I would borrow my cousin's library card when we spent summers with her, and I made my aunt mail me something when we rented an apartment for the summer in California, just so I would have a mailing address to give to the Cupertino library. I never used my university library card for fun reading, but the public library was a few blocks down the street. They moved it my senior year, but thankfully, by then I was dating the boy, who had a car and was roped into many library runs. When I first moved here, one of the first things I did was look up where the libraries were. I currently have library cards to three separate library systems here. The best thing about where I currently live is that the library is not even a block away, right across the street.
8. Because I never had enough books in Taiwan, I reread everything I owned, multiple times. It got to the point where I would go through the shelves and remember which parts of the book I didn't want to reread while I was picking what to read next. Today, I have so many unread books that they probably fill two bookshelves, but this only makes me feel a little secure and a lot more greedy.
9. I used to always have a book on me, just in case I got bored, got stuck, had nothing better to do, etc. I would read during my parents' dinners with their friends right at the table (I still get "Oh, I remember you! You're the kid who always had a book at the table!" from people). I tried to read during class, book hidden under my desk, and got caught enough so that I stopped. One of my friends taught herself to read and go down stairs, but I was too clumsy for that (I tried to, though). If I didn't have a book, I would read signs, cereal boxes, instructions, anything. I'm a little more social now, but I'll get caught in a situation every month or so where I'll regret not having a book in my purse. Sitting and staring into space when I could be reading seems unnatural.
10. School projects that involved the encyclopedia would inevitably take twice the amount of time that they normally would, because I would look something up and then spend the next three hours reading through all the "interesting" encyclopedia entries. I also used to read my mom's mass-market dictionary of medical terms from Time-Life, which is probably why I am somewhat hypochondriac and am interested in plagues, diseases and epidemics.
11. When my family first got an internet connection, the first thing I did was get online to try and look up things to read. I was sorely disappointed that people didn't post entire books online. Then I found fanfic. The first book I got from Amazon was Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, except I thought it was by Terry Brooks. It turns out Brooks only wrote the introduction (I was in a Terry Brooks thing). I only bought it because Geocities gave me a $5 gift certificate and the book was $4.99. Shipping to Taiwan was horrendously expensive and I vowed never to do it again. The next year, I ended up accumulating half of Sandman off Amazon (the other half I scrounged for in local bookstores). Now the internet enables me to get loads and loads of book recs, which makes me very, very happy.
12. I was once afraid that working at a bookstore would mean that I would get sick of books, which was something that I couldn't imagine. I shouldn't have been scared. Working at a bookstore only served to increase my list of books to read exponentially.
13. I grew up in a family that both encouraged reading and didn't. My mom claims that I read so much because she would read to me for hours when I was little. My dad always read thrillers and business books, and I remember giving him a cork pin cut in the shape of a book, with "The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy" written on the front. But what I mostly remember are scenes of my parents constantly telling me to get my nose out of a book, that I would ruin my eyesight, that I should go out and play more. While both of my parents read non-fiction and literature, I was introduced to genre by friends and random books in the school library.
14. It's probably rather rude for people who don't love books, but the first thing I do when I visit someone's house is gravitate toward the bookshelves, after which I make a survey of what they like to read and how the books are organized and how many there are.
15. I used to think I was well read. Then I found LJ. (This is, by the way, a very good thing.)
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Wed, Dec. 14th, 2005 06:16 am (UTC)