Skip to main content

Top Ten Tuesddays meme: Bookish confessions

This week the bloggers of The Broke and the Bookish urge us to use our blogs as confessionals:
"Anything! You dog ear, you hated a book  but said you loved it, you have $500 library fines...anything goes!"

So, in no particular order, here are my confessions (don't forget to check out the rest):

  1. I break spines (but only on paperbacks).
  2. I buy most of my books second hand, meaning the authors don’t get any royalties from me.
  3. Give me a book and unless I specifically asked you to give it to me I will, in all likelihood, return it and use the credit to buy a book I know I'll want to keep.
  4. Back in my student days (when I was pretty much broke) I would buy books, read them and return them to the book-store.
  5. I have been known to check out 20 library books at once... and return 19 of them unopened.
  6. Back when I was studying English. Lit., I read several classic novels and wrote admiring and glowing essays about them that got full marks from the teachers, but in actuality I hated several of them. Bleak House and Wuthering Heigths are two examples. WH I still hate, but BH is proving to be a delightful reread so far. I think it was mostly its length I objected to in the beginning.
  7. I borrowed a book from my mother in 2010 and still haven’t returned it.
  8. I only keep one in about 10 books I buy.
  9. I have excused myself from attending parties and other events because I wanted to read a particularly interesting book.
  10. My uncle returned The Lord of the Rings to me looking like it was chewed on by a dog. I forgave him for that. I still haven’t forgiven him for returning it in that condition and having the temerity to not even have finished it. That was 20 years ago.
The only ones I am a bit ashamed of are #1 and #4.
The others are included because other people may find them shaming. 

Comments

The Housework Can Wait said…
High five for hating Wuthering Heights!

And I'm totally with you on getting upset when you loan someone a book and they return it without finishing it. Especially if they have the tenacity to damage it.

Thanks for stopping by my TTT!
August 28, 2012 1:36 pm
Shannon (Giraffe Days) said…
Your list is so funny, some of these really made me laugh! But #1 made me wince, I hate cracked spines, my parents-in-law do it to all their paperbacks (which is why I don't lend them books).

I keep every book I buy, even when I thought it was crap. I like my home library to be that diverse!

Totally with you on #9.
August 28, 2012 2:07 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and
Post a Comment
Read more