Skip to main content

Booking through Thursday

Today's question on Booking Through Thursday is "What’s the worst thing you ever did to your reading material?"

It’s time for summer reading, so … today’s question? What’s the worst thing you ever did to your reading material? Sand in the bindings from the beach? Dropped into the pool? Covers smeared with sunscreen?
And, if you’ve never done actual summer-time damage … have you EVER damaged your book/magazine/paper? Dropped it in the bathtub? Used it to kill a bug? Spilled with coffee?

The worst thing I have accidentally done to a book was spill tea all over it. I may also have crushed an insect or two between pages and left food-stains inside books.

I have, however, deliberately done worse things to books.
I have:
  • hollowed them out to make hiding places. To be fair to myself, these were books I bought second hand and started reading, only to discover that there were pages missing. I do have one Reader's Digest book ready for hollowing and I don't feel bad about it at all - it is, after all, a volume of digested, i.e. edited books, and in my opinion that is one of the worst things you can do to a good book (don't, however, get me started on bloated monstrosities like The Historian - that I would gladly edit and it would be better for it).
  • given them to my pet parrots to shred (one book with missing pages and one terrible, terrible book that made me mad because of homophobic elements)
  • put them in the recycling bin 
In my opinion, the very worst thing you can do to a book is to leave it unread. If you can not or will not read a book you have in your possession, give someone else a chance to read it. It's disrespectful to the author, the publisher and not least the trees that gave their lives for the paper to not give a book a chance to be read. This may be why I love second hand books so much. I know most of them have already been read at least once and so I don't feel too guilty about leaving them in my TBR stack for years on end.
Labels:

Comments

gautami tripathy said…
I will hollow out the tomes I hate and no one wants!

Thanks for putting that thought in my mind!

Here is my BTT post
June 27, 2013 11:41 am
Laurel-Rain Snow said…
I have never hollowed out a book...but in the case you describe, it seemed appropriate.

Hollowing a book reminds me of those mystery novels where a treasure is found in the hollowed space.

Here's MY BTT POST
June 27, 2013 1:16 pm
Unknown said…
I've never hollowed out a book but I sure would love to try that one day (when I find the book to do it to). And I'm guilty for unread books.


Andrea K. @ Books and Bindings
Booking Through Thursday
June 27, 2013 1:31 pm
Hazel said…
We have the same reason for loving second hand book so much.

Hazel
June 27, 2013 3:00 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...
25 comments
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more