Reading Meme

From Booking Through Thursday:

1. Favorite childhood book?
Probably Boy or The BFG by Roald Dahl.

2. What are you reading right now?
Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan. I just finished The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama too.

3. What books do you have on request at the library?
I don't have a library up here, boo.

4. Bad book habit?
Oh you name it. I dog-ear pages, leaving the spines broken, just generally abuse them. I think a loved book is a tattered one.

5. What do you currently have checked out at the library?
My last selection of checked out books were all Elizabeth Peters.

6. Do you have an e-reader?
No, and I don't want one until the technology improves.

7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once?
I'm infamous for not only reading several books at once, but writing several at once.

8. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog?
I think they changed when I started college. Less reading, more internet.

9. Least favorite book you read this year (so far?)
Wow, I don't generally read books I don't like... I really can't answer this.

10. Favorite book you’ve read this year?
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

11. How often do you read out of your comfort zone?
Not very. Though I sometimes go on kicks of this.

12. What is your reading comfort zone?
Well-done sci-fi/fantasy (read: not cliched schlock). An occasional bad romance. Literary fiction. Thriller mysteries that are all about the characters, not the story.

13. Can you read on the bus?
Not really. I get motion sickness.

14. Favorite place to read?
In bed - or curled up on the couch next to my boy.

15. What is your policy on book lending?
I'm pretty free with it.

16. Do you ever dog-ear books?
Do I ever. I'm better about it than I used to be, but if it's my book, forget it.

17. Do you ever write in the margins of your books?
D is constantly complaining about this.

18. Not even with text books?
...oh, but I do it in my regular books more.

19. What is your favorite language to read in?
English is the only one I comprehend enough.

20. What makes you love a book?
Compelling characters. Clever dialogue.

21. What will inspire you to recommend a book?
The above.

22. Favorite genre?
Used to be fantasy, now I'm just gonna say "well-written books".

23. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did?)
Mainstream fiction/chick lit.

24. Favorite biography?
I liked one of Jack London's I read as a kid. I bet I'd love Dreams of My Father.

25. Have you ever read a self-help book?
I browse through them occasionally.

26. Favorite cookbook?
My Better Homes and Gardens cookbook.

27. Most inspirational book you’ve read this year (fiction or non-fiction)?
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch - for the language and descriptions.

28. Favorite reading snack?
I eat whole meals while I read.

29. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience.
Twilight? I thought maybe I'd find something to like in it, but no. It was just dreck.

30. How often do you agree with critics about a book?
Critics are not my favorite people.

31. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews?
Honesty, dudes and dudettes.

32. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you chose?
French. Or Russian. Possibly Arabic.

33. Most intimidating book you’ve ever read?
The Source by James Michner. I had to read it for 9th grade and it was so ... dull. But I made it through.

34. Most intimidating book you’re too nervous to begin?
Wuthering Heights. Weirdly. Because I think I'll love it too much.

35. Favorite Poet?
Theodore Roethke.

36. How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time?
One or two.

37. How often have you returned book to the library unread?
Half the time. That's why I cut down to only checking out one or two.

38. Favorite fictional character?
Will from His Dark Materials (He's in The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass)

39. Favorite fictional villain?
Petyr Baelish from A Song of Ice and Fire (especially in A Feast for Crows)

40. Books I’m most likely to bring on vacation?
Old fantasy favorites. Harry Potter, Wheel of Time, ASOIAF

41. The longest I’ve gone without reading.
Probably a month. Maybe two.

42. Name a book that you could/would not finish.
I didn't finish Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel the first time. And I'm still not sure why.

43. What distracts you easily when you’re reading?
Other people in the room trying to talk/read to me.

44. Favorite film adaptation of a novel?
Lord of the Rings without a doubt.

45. Most disappointing film adaptation?
The Golden Compass.

46. The most money I’ve ever spent in the bookstore at one time?
Upwards of 60 bucks.

47. How often do you skim a book before reading it?
Not very. Though in a bookstore I always flip open the book and read a random page after I read the beginning just to make sure the writing doesn't go downhill.

48. What would cause you to stop reading a book half-way through?
Cliche plot. One dimensional characters. Something utterly ridiculous happening for no reason. BAD BAD writing (Stephenie Meyer, I am staring daggers at you.)

49. Do you like to keep your books organized?
I do this sometimes.

50. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you’ve read them?
Both.

51. Are there any books you’ve been avoiding?
Ish? Not really. I read what I want when I want.

52. Name a book that made you angry.
I've been angry with my WoT re-read because I see a lot of wasted potential.

53. A book you didn’t expect to like but did?
Janet Evanovich's One for the Money

54. A book that you expected to like but didn’t?
...Twilight. Before the biggest hype.

55. Favorite guilt-free, pleasure reading?
Romance schlock. Whee.

Themes

I've noticed some trends in my writing lately. Have been re-reading a lot of my old stuff. So I'm just going to list some of them here for future reference. I'd be very interested in hearing fellow writers' lists, or even just random opinion on why these seem to be my themes. I haven't had enough reflection time to answer that last one.

BETRAYAL. Boy, am I fond of that. There is at least one instance of this in almost everything I have ever written.



COMING OF AGE. Sort of a typical thing to write about when you're young yourself.



TRAGIC ROMANCES. Le sigh. I love them so.




More as I think of them.

We, soldiers of a different sort -

“We, Soldiers of a different sort,
We, wasters of ink and page,
We, warriors of words,
Masters of melancholy,
Harlots of the pen,
We bleed these volumes,
and expect only absolution.”
- Jarvis Black

Writing has been going... and going. I made an executive decision to get virtual TTT sessions going. TTT, for those not in the know, is a writing group that a few of us began back when I was a junior. The acronym stands for Triumvirate of Tea and Toast as we were originally a threesome who would get together in my kitchen, drink tea, and make extravagant toasts to our own greatness. Really it was a chance for us to get together and commiserate, read, and edit each other's work. Often it devolved into the sharing of internet memes and occasionally insane giggling fits induced by too many pixie stix. (I bought a ginormous package of them for NaNo that year, and they carried through for much of the year.)

The year after its inception, TTT gained some distinction. We assigned T-words to describe our different writing styles (Terror, Tragedy, and Tra La La - guess which one is mine?). We created ourselves a banner that hung proudly in my room and living room for two years, and which caused some grief when I left Worcester and had to leave it with the other two original members.

(Preserved forever in photographic form. Our Ts are all supposed to correspond to their meaning.)

This past year, we incorporated another person (unfortunately he's still T-less, but we did say he could be the floating tea pot above my head on the poster). And last semester all four of us blazed our way through National Novel Writing Month together because we are awesome like that. So it was a little sad this year with our newest member and me both moving away from Worcester. Terror and Tra La La will fortunately be living together for their final undergraduate year. But due to this minor diaspora, we decreed that having virtual TTT sessions was a must.

I've decided to commit myself to getting through the final edits for Wings of Destiny, my 2008 NaNo of paranormal romance genre proportions. Via virtual TTT this means getting an edit from my fellow writers for a chapter each week. This also means that I have to personally edit a chapter a week. Good kick in my butt, I'd say. I'm excited about this because I think it's going to be a lot like what William Tapply's Writing the Novel and Advanced Fiction Writing classes were (minus his awesome read-aloud of our work).

So I've got that going.

Face the Flames is still forging ahead. Slowly but surely. Chapter 8 is gonna be done in the next few weeks. And then there's only one more chapter in part one! Part Two is gonna be a hellacious ride, so I'm itching to get to it. Plus Terror and Tra La La make special guest appearances beginning in chapter 9. Whee.

And then there's the short story I signed up to write for Fantasy Big Bang.


Author Sign Ups | Artist Sign Ups
Come and join us at the
I'm writing a prequel to Creatures of the Wind, a novel of mine that is almost as old as Face the Flames. Yow. More about that as I write it.

That's where things stand in my writing world. Now if I could just get a job...

(No real reason for this other than my thinking that every writer should have a cat. This is Callie, my grandparents' calico. She's a sweetheart and absolutely loves to walk across my keyboard whenever I'm typing. ... of course, I have a quote for this.)

"A catless writer is almost inconcievable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys."
- Barbara Holland

BTT: First Time

What is the first book you remember reading? What about the first that made you really love reading?

If I had a memory THAT good, I would have been a lot better at organic chemistry!

Some of the first books I remember reading and re-reading and re-re-reading were the Little Critter books. I recall one particular instance of showing off my read aloud skills to my cousin. I read "the cat lies in the sun" and he made fun of me by asking how the cat could possibly lie on the sun - isn't zillions of degrees?

We had a library of Scholastic books of all levels and I tore my way through all of them (several times). When I got to chapter books, I read my Judy Blume so many times that I actually corrected a babysitter who was reading them to me when she said the wrong word.


Lucky for me that love of reading runs in my family and no one ever thought this was weird. It wasn't until I got to (roughly) middle school that the other kids started being weirded out / astonished that I went through several books in the course of a week!