Let's Talk About Books

Recently, Jessica at Chronically Vintage posted about her bibliophile habits, including a questionnaire, and I thought it would be fun to answer it here as well.  I don't think it would be overstating the matter to say that I regard books as friends.  It is hard for me to weed out certain books because I get attached, even to titles I only read once, or haven't finished yet.  Sometimes I can walk away with ease, but mostly, I like to keep my friends close.  And my friends are numerous.  I am usually reading about three or four books at once, and I read fast, so I need a lot of books to supply my appetites!  There are certain books I love to read over and over cough*Outlander*cough* but some that I just read once and put aside.  And then there are the books that I mean to re-read but never quite get around to them.

Do you snack while you read? If so, what is your favourite reading snack? 

I generally don't like to snack while I read, as it interferes with my reading.  Oddly, I don't mind reading while eating a meal at the table, but I don't do this very often because I'm so often dining with my family.  If I do snack while reading, I like little nibbles like pretzels.

What is your favourite drink while reading? 

I don't drink a lot during the day as a general rule (I know, terrible), but I often have a mug of coffee that follows me around the house, so probably coffee if I'm going to have anything.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you? 

Well.  I'm of two minds about this.  One of my main complaints about reading on a Kindle is having to deal with all the highlights left by others (I find it highly distracting), but at the same time, there are often things I want to remember for later.  When I was in school, I wrote in my textbooks all the time, but these days, my method is to either dog ear the page that has a significant passage in it and then go back later and copy it out in a notebook, or I note the page number and the beginning line in a small notebook (and perhaps a short note about why it struck me, as sometimes I don't remember why when I go back later) and refer back to it later.  I usually do this when I'm planning to use the material for an essay, blog post, or for my quote book.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open? 

I'm a bad one for turning books on their spines, but I also use bookmarks.  (My husband would disagree with me on this, as my definition of a bookmark is fairly lax--I basically use any flat piece of whatever is to hand, be it a band-aid wrapper or a tag off my yarn skein.)

Fiction, non-fiction, or both? 

I read both, but tend toward fiction.  I've always been a heavy fiction reader--my preferred genres are diverse, but I am a big fan of well-done historical fiction.  I tend to avoid "trendy" books--I've never been one to follow a crowd.  That said, I did get into the Twilight series as it came at a kind of critical personal juncture for me, and touched a nerve.  I still don't understand the appeal of the Hunger Games.  I read the first one for a book club, but had no interest in finishing the series.  Obviously, I've read a ton of non-fiction for my degrees, but not all of it was enjoyable.  When you read for a living, and are expected to read 3 books a week not of your choosing, sometimes you have to read for speed rather than pleasure.  I do enjoy research, however, and can devour whole stacks in a go when I'm into a topic.

Are you the kind of person who tends to read to the end of a chapter, or can you stop anywhere? 

With small children around, I generally have to stop where ever I am on the page, because I get interrupted a lot, but when I'm reading at my leisure, usually at night, I try to get to a stopping point before putting it down.  Many of the books I read have paragraph breaks, or mid-chapter breaks (because I read doorstops), so I get to one of those before packing it in.

Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you? 

No, of course not!  I have been known to snort through my nose at an author's audacity or absurdity, and to argue out loud with a book, but I don't do physical violence to books.  That would be cruel.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away? 

Nope.  I generally try to get the gist of it from the context.  If my husband is around, I'll ask him, because he is a walking dictionary in several languages, and can usually break something down into Greek or Latin roots, but otherwise, I just move on.  Reading this way has given me a fairly good vocabulary, I think, but I often check the meaning of a word before I use it myself, just to ascertain that I've understood it correctly.

What are you currently reading? 

I'm finishing Written in My Own Heart's Blood, the eighth installment of the Outlander series, I'm stalled with Cheap, mostly because I'm annoyed with the author's lack of prescription and heavy use of technical talk in a mass marketed book.  I enjoyed the historical background section, but she kind of lost me about 1/3 in.  I mean to finish it though.  I did start Game of Thrones this spring, but I put it aside, as it just didn't grab me enough to stick with it.  I'm enjoying the HBO series very much, but I don't think I'll pursue the books.  A friend just recommended Pat Barker's Regeneration triology (based on my comments about the Great War on Wednesday), so I'm hoping to read that in the fall.  I have Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End in my amazon queue for the next time I  place an order, and I've been dipping into and out of Francis Spufford's Red Plenty since Christmas, as it is episodic and can be read in spurts.  Because it is a non-linear sort of story, it is hard to get invested in the characters, because each chapter is a new era, new scenario, new set of characters.  I also received Collette's Sewing with Knits book for my birthday, and will probably start reading it this week. I'm also eager for Gertie's Sewing Vintage Casual book to release in September so I can give that a go.  I've also had Peter King's Antimodern Condition sitting on my night table for a few months and mean to finish that before too long as well.  

What is the last book you bought? 

Well, I bought a bunch of books recently for the kids, but for myself, it would have to be Written In My Own Heart's Blood, and before that, The Language of Clothes (which I've yet to crack).

Are you the type of person that reads one book at a time, or can you read more than one? 

See above!  I love to read several things at a time, mostly so I can read according to my mood and circumstance.

Do you have a favourite time/place to read? 

I like to read in bed at night, just before going to sleep, but I'll read almost anywhere, any time.  If I read during the day, I like to lay on the couch.

Do you prefer series books or stand-alones? 

I love a series!  It is so sad to me to finish a book and not have anything to look forward to reading next.  A series means there is usually something else to read right away.  (When we went to Ireland in 2010, I read the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and when I finished it on the trip, I was so involved in the story and characters, I went right out to a bookshop in Dublin to find the next book in the triology!)

Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over? 

For fiction, Diana Gabaldon, of course!  The Midwife by Jennifer Worth (the book upon which the series Call the Midwife is based), Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (the man will make you weep for the beauty of his prose), The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough (I love me a complex main character), the Decker/Lazarus detective novels by Faye Kellerman (start at the beginning of the series with The Ritual Bath, as they are somewhat chronological), Mario Puzo's books (I'm especially fond of The Godfather, but I also liked his book on the Borgias), and Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko series (starting with Gorky Park).  I'm a bit of a sucker for historical novels about the last tsar and his family (and in particular, those that feature stories where one or more of the children survived, spirited away to America or Britain under an assumed name, even though I know what really happened).

For classic literature, I really enjoyed Gogol's Dead Souls, although it has been about 15 years since I read it.  Such a wild and crazy adventure.  I also love Sherlock Holmes, and have read the complete stories several times over.  Tolstoy's Anna Karenina helped me to understand parts of Russian culture that seemed so strange when I lived there.  1984 is one of those novels I think everyone should read, if only to keep the specter of Big Brotherism at bay in general society.

I don't read a lot of memoirs, but Cheaper by the Dozen is also a delightful little tome on a family of 12 children in the early part of the 20th century, written by the three eldest children.  I've also read My Sergei by Ekaterina Gordeeva at least three or four times.  Even though I know what is coming, the ending guts me every time.  Slavenca Draculic tops my list for memoirs of communism, with her somewhat humorous book, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.  Her follow up book, Cafe Europa, is quite a bit more sober.  I've read a bit of Nadezhda Mandelstam, and I think she is a very important author, and someone who should be read in order to understand what was lost in the Great Terror of the 1930s in Stalinist Russia.  I also need to read more Solzhenitsyn as I think he is another of those important authors whose works should be read and internalized.

For non-fiction, I can't say how many times I've referenced and recommended Jonathan Last's What to Expect When No One is Expecting, and I found Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and Rose George's The Big Necessity thought-provoking.  Seeing Like a State was one of the best books I read in graduate school, as it helped me to understand some of the folly of central planning, big government thinking, and other ways that the modern state has failed.  I thoroughly enjoyed Charles Murray's Coming Apart (I mean to read Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam as a kind of follow up when I whittle down my in progress stack a bit).  I also liked Fast Food Nation, Crunchy Cons, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, and Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  I love Peter Menzel's work, and his photoessays on global consumption are fascinating and eye-opening (Material World is about what people around the world have in their homes, and Hungry Planet is about what people around the world eat in a week's time)  John Thompson's Russia and the Soviet Union (vol. 4) is a bit dated, but a nice primer on Russian and Soviet history.  I also loved David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb.  Fascinating stuff.  Resurrection (his 1990s era follow up book) is okay, but not nearly as meaty as the first book.  I think it is harder to assess the legacy of the 1990s in the wake of the collapse of communism whilst in the middle of the crisis.   For a history of how history is impacted by disease, it doesn't get better than William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples.  A Short History of Byzantium by John Julian Norwich is a nice primer on the Eastern Empire, and Suzanne Massie's Land of the Firebird is a wonderful cultural history of Russia (and much more accessible than Orlando Figes' weighty tome on the subject)

I also have a list of books I've read on 1940s fashion in the last couple of years, but they were mostly just to shore up the knowledge in my head, and useful for putting outfits together and understanding how people dressed at the time.  

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author's last name, etc.)

I discussed that a bit with this post, but our books are organized first by genre (history, philosophy, popular fiction, poetry, classic literature, foreign languages, theology, general non-fiction, plays, lives of saints, parenting books, science, children's books, liturgical reference works, general reference works, coffee table picture books). Within each section, books are arranged alphabetically by author's last name, unless there is no author (in the case of several books about saints) in which case it is by first letter of the title. The children's books are just stacked in a mish-mosh of titles between two bookshelves because they are constantly pulling out books and putting them back willy-nilly. It isn't worth the effort to keep them organized except by size. (I tend to stack the tall books to the left and work my way down to the board books). The parenting books are also just stacked according to topic rather than author.

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As you can see, I could talk about books all day long and still not exhaust the subject.  Books energize me; the ideas and stories contained within are my bread and butter, my mental sustenance.