Monday Meme: The Book Meme

I am a huge fan of books and have a library that is, lets just say, extensive. I have surprisingly few pictures with books given how many books I have in my house, but they've been ubiquitous since I was a child. Berry asks us a bunch of questions about books, and I had a ball answering them, even if it was a reminder of how rarely I remember book and author names.

1. Are you a bookworm? – Totally. In addition to a sizable internet reading schedule, I have about thirty free books on my phone and easily one or two hundred books in my house.


2. Which do you prefer: hardcover, paperback or electronic? – I use paperbacks the most, mostly because of cost and easy of reading them in bed. I have a few hardcovers for the series I was too impatient to wait for the paperback edition, but those are few and far between and I always pick up the paperback once I can. I keep my electronic to free until I can come up with a way to ensure I won't spend hundreds of bucks on books only to have them vanish for some TOS violation.


3. Which book is your favorite? – I'm also a huge fan of  Pride and Prejudice, and re-read it several times a year. I have most of Austen's books in miniature book form, which are adorable. In terms of books which I've reread and which have had a profound effect on me outside, I have to point to Beauty, by Robin McKinley, Fool's Run, by Patricia McKillip, and Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. I am a voracious re-reader, but these are the ones which have carried me through decades. Outside of that, the books I re-read the most are the Black Jewels Series by Anne Bishop, less the original series and more the extensive continuations. Sadly, some of the stuff I was hoping to see never showed, and it appears that the characters I'd hoped to become more central were forgotten, but I still adore the series for all of its flaws (and since I've read it so much, I know them all). These books are the only time I've bought the hardback because I wanted the book at home and was too impatient to wait for the softcover.


4. Which children’s book is your favorite? – I have two favorites - one from when I was a child, and one from when I was a teenager. I grew up loving A Little Princess, by Francis Hodgson Burnett, and wishing I could be a Sarah. I'm not - she has a gentle and refined soul that I never seem to be able to approach, but then she's also fictional. As a teenager, I ran across Apple Tree Cottage, by Virginia F. Voight, and simply adore it. It is a book I miss and read when I remember it, like the others I have enumerated above.


5. What’s the last book you’ve read? – I just finished Twilight's Dawn, by Anne Bishop, which wrapped up a lot of the threads form her Black Jewels Series. I'm about halfway through Home from the Sea, one of Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Master's Series (highly recommended, along with her 500 Kingdoms series).


6. Name your top five favorite writers: – Jane Austen, Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, Gail Carriger, and Seanan McGuire.


7. Name a book that had a strong impact on you: – Plato's Lysis, a dialog of Socrates. It was one of the first times I was ever pissed off by a dialogue, and introduced me to my own passion for solid thought.




8. Favorite & least favorite book genres? – I'm a huge fan of fantasy and science fiction, somewhat of romance and mystery, and hugely of classical literature. I'm trying to make my bookshelves less white, but it's slow going. I've never read a Western, which I suppose says something?


9. Favorite & least favorite book-to-movie adaptions? – I'm going to cheat a little. I adore, adore, adore, adore without words The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which as far as I'm concerned not only met the original Pride and Prejudice where it lived, but improved on it in ways Austen wouldn't have been able to due to the limitations of her era. My least favorite is the Hayao Miyazaki adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle, which is weird since I adore Miyazaki. He took a complicated story about loving people for who they were and turned it into a main character who doesn't think she's pretty - a truly shallow reading of the source book - and I literally can't watch it.


10. Have you ever bought a book based on the cover alone? – Yesish, that's how I found Gail Carriger, actually - her cover was amusingly Steampunk - but I always read the backs, too, and she gave good blurb. She's sort of a Steampunk Jane Austen, though sometimes her Comedy of Manners becomes Mystery or Adventure Novel.


11. Where do you usually buy your books? – I was a Borders sycophant for years, but now I shop at local stores or at a yearly trip to Barnes and Noble.


12. Do you go to the library? – I used to, but my local libraries are kind of thin on the books in general, and ordering in costs a dollar a pop, so it isn't the gleeful weekly trip it was when I was a child. When I was a child I'd easily leave with a bag of ten books for two weeks rental, and have them back most of them read. Now my reading is a lot more sporadic in terms of books; I reread as a part of self-soothing, and so my reading of new and very challenging books suffers.


13. How many books do you own? – Easily one or two hundred in my home, and another hundred or two boxed up. I've been thinning the herd recently, but it's hard for me to give up books.


14. If you were to write a book about Second Life, which topic would you focus on? Probably issues of identity and self-awareness in virtual environments - or how we internalize and play out prejudices in virtual spaces. I'm fascinated by how we make the world around us, and virtual worlds are a particularly clear example of that, lacking almost entirely in basic needs that have to be filled. How we interact with each other, what we build, how we treat each other, etc... is all made much clearer due to this.

( More pictures here. )