I like reading. Always have, probably always will. It started with easy stuff, like Nancy Drew and the Animorphs. Then my third-grade teacher gave me Watership Down by Richard Adams. I almost always list that one on my favorite books list because it changed my life. Watership Down is about four hundred pages long. At eight years old it took me three days to finish. I loved it. Loved the story, loved the characters . . . loved that I was no longer bound to the children’s section. I could roam free.
Roam I did. I liked mysteries, fantasy, and science fiction best. In truth, I still like SF/F best, but I have a love/hate relationship with mysteries. They’re no fun if I can figure out who the culprit is. Unfortunately, I used to be a dense reader but as I spend more time writing analysis of stories I get better and better about picking up on small clues.
My first romance was some book my mom left lying around. This is a dangerous thing to do around a voracious book reader. If s/he is bored, s/he will pick your book up and read it no matter how lame it sounds. I tend to read straight romance less than many of my other preferred genres because I like to relax with it. I also get attached to my favorites and keep reading those instead of new ones. (The Bride by Julie Garwood. The Viscount Who Loved Me by Julia Quinn.) Plus I’m too young to be over the embarrassing covers. (My mom’s attitude is, “My coworkers don’t read. Why would I care what they think about my book?”)
However, I do like my other books to have strong romantic elements. I enjoy having a couple to cheer on! If I have no couple, I’m likely inventing sexual tension. Oh yes, and I read shoujo manga. Chock full of relationships, those are.
When I’m not reading, I’m watching movies, hanging with friends, or studying. I’m an undergrad honors student. I play percussion. I draw. I write. I edit. I can talk about chocolate chip pancakes with unbridled passion. I named my car Ibby because I thought it fit her well. I get notions like this quite a bit. I can use my toes to open drawers and remove or put stuff inside of them. I collect Good Luck CareBears. I can’t sing in tune but I do it anyway. I buy shoes. I suck at talking about myself. This took ridiculously long to write and it’s still lame.
I’m in my 40’s. When will I be old enough to be over the embarrassing covers?
My mom is nearly 47, so maybe you only have a few years to go?
I was hoping it was an age thing. There’s just something about carrying around a book with nekkid people on the cover that intimidates me.
Now I really feel my age. I’m two years older than your mom, Liv. And the older you get, the less you care about what other folks think. Don’t care at all now who sees my half-dressed men on my romance books like I did when I was your age. Sorry to say you have a few years of embarrassment left.
Watership Down is one of my fav books too. You know there’s a sequel, right? Well, a book of stories. It’s called Tales from Watership Down, I believe.
@Sandy: Age really freaks me out. My youngest cousin will have to live four times as long as she has to be my age. I’ll have to live more than twice as long as I have to be my mom’s age. And even then I won’t be old old. It’s just weird.
@Jennifer: I own that one too. I was very excited the first time I saw it in a bookstore. (That’s me. Losing my cool over a book about rabbits. It’s a wonder there was any cool to start with.)
O_o Why does age freak you out, Liv? As for book covers, I care a lot less. When I first read romances the cover played a big part in what I read [and I tried to go for the ones without the glaring “romance” sticker on them – b/c honestly, those library stickers are ugly as hell.
Then I ran out of books… oh and the next library had self check out – that was nice – and now… whatever. 😛
For certain areas, however, I still “hide” book covers. Like I wouldn’t be flashing it around in a courthouse, or recorder’s office. Haha – so I care some, but it depends. Walking out of the library/bookstore? No big deal. Walking into work… that book will be living in my bag.
Age is just bizarre. It’s utterly logical for a five-year-old to consider me old. After all, I’m just as old to her as an eighty-year-old would be to me. But no one would like that five-year-old to call me old because that would make them even older. I think about this way too much.
My library doesn’t use stickers, yay! Walking out of the library people aren’t looking at my covers, they’re staring at the girl trying to keep a grip on 19 books. As for the bookstore, everyone knows me there. For some reason it’s only strangers that bother me. Mainly because I make up stories about the people around me in my head and I’m convinced they do too.
‘Slightly quacky’ was a good title for this post methinks.
When I was little, we lived in Houso Bizarro. It had started with a two-up, two-down cobbler’s shop in the middle of Leicester. Then the blacksmith next door moved premises and my great-grandfather bought it, so we had a huge slate-paved yard and two more rooms, neither of which were built on a square. One of those was my bedroom, later on. Then my grandfather bought the cafe on the other side of the house (we lived on the corner of the street, so we ended up with an L shaped house) and we got more rooms and a run of outhouses.
The rooms in the original house were huge and we didn’t have central heating. So my family went in for insulation. The best kind. We had huge floor to ceiling bookcases and my family went in for buying books. By the case, by the yard.
And I read them. Stuffed all over the house, all kinds of books. Not until my mother found me reading the scandalous “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” by Mickey Spillane (which had Stockholm Syndrome long before it was called that) did she think to do some kind of censorship. Even then she left me The Saint and James Bond.
So I read. Everything, anything, all the time.
*blinks* That sounds like the most awesome house ever.
I had a great-aunt who’s living room was lined with shelves for movies. Inspired by that room, I’ve already planned to line my house with bookshelves whenever I get my own.
My mom never really tried to censor my reading. Sometimes she would say something about how she wished she hadn’t left so-and-so book lying around, but she never took the books away from me once I started them. There was one book she didn’t want me to read, so I very obligingly read it at my dad’s.
I think censoring what kids read is foolish. For the kids who aren’t interested in reading, it makes the forbidden book attractive. For those who do read, they’re used to getting enough books to keep them occupied. They’ll get their hands on what they want to read with or without parental consent.
“No Orchids for Miss Blandish” sounds like such an innocent title.
Liv- here’s a good one for you on age [maybe I’ll think about it more b/c I had like a quarter life crisis or something last time the Olympics happened. I felt so old and useless compared to the 16 year old gold medalists] – but no, what I meant is… one of my students asked me how old I was this past year, and I think said “40 something?” before his teacher, scandalized, jumped down his throat and said you never ask a lady that question. Lol.
“40 something”? Since when are you forty something?
I have that complex about Olympic athletes too.
It kinda was and it kinda wasn’t. It was damp, and because central heating was a lost dream, we generally lived in two rooms in the coldest weather, in the living room, where we kept a fire going, and the kitchen, where the boiler (now they’re posh and called Agas and Rayburns – then they were a cheap way of getting heat and hot water) was. I still have a scar on the back of my hand from that boiler. My mother dropped the lid on it when I was three years old.
And it was hell to clean. My mother “bottomed” it once a week. Oh yes, and the outside loo was no fun. We had a toilet in the bathroom, but it wasn’t connected to anything, it just came with the suite and we were forbidden to use it. So it was the old outside privy, lit by a hurricane lamp and the spiders and bats. I didn’t mind the bats.
But the books were nice.
What’s “bottoming”? I assume some kind of cleaning, but it sounds rather . . . British.
I’ve only had to use outdoor toilets when camping, and thus I know I love indoor plumbing.
Well, since I’m British, you might be right. “Bottoming” is the great big clean, as opposed to the daily one. The one where you get to the bottom of the drawer, you see. So furniture got moved, floors got scrubbed, we had a cold lunch because she cleaned out the boiler… you get the idea!
Ah yes. That sort of thing never happens in our house. (Not that we don’t clean. We just don’t clean down to the drawers. I’m excellent at bathrooms . . . if I get paid.)
However, my roommate and I did it in our dorm room one day because we had ants. People kept asking us what we were doing since they had to crawl through our belongings in the hallway.