#but i remember hearing & seeing them for the first time in 2014. and how vermilion pt 2 stuck to the back of my mind for 10 years after that

[rucow]

i grew up with a lot of 90s/early 2000s metal, and i was actually surprised to find out korn isn't quite as big as slipknot? bc i knew about korn since the early 2000s, but i hadnt heard of slipknot until 2014 😵‍💫 something interesting to think about

[theticklishpear]

Reading Meme

Tagged by @lizard-is-writing! Thank you so much, Lizard! I loved hearing about your adventures with books from your uncle’s store--so fascinating to think about the hands that have held those books and where they traveled.

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

I still have a book about the tooth fairy and Good Night Moon from when I was really little, then Crocodile! Crocodile! Stories Told Around the World was gifted to me for Christmas in 1995 by my step-aunt, and then The Rough-Faced Girl gifted to me by my grandmother in 1998, and The Secrets of Vesuvius that I bought from a Scholastic book fair in 2001 (according to the order slip that’s still tucked in its pages).

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?

Currently, I’m stalled out halfway through Tiffany Rose and Alexandra Tauber’s Hello World; last was Passenger by Alexandra Bracken; Magic Bites from Ilona Andrews is up next!

3. Which book does everyone like and you hated?

Truth be told, I dislike most classic literature. Not all of it--Crime and Punishment is one of my favorite books--but Jane Austen, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Ayn Rand, etc.... not my cup of tea. I can appreciate what they’ve done for literature and I can appreciate their historical context, but I am distinctly not a fan.

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?

I started reading The Arabian Nights as part of a quest to read the original stories that many Disney movies were based off of. I... I have theoretically been reading it since October 20, 2012, according to my Goodreads page. I have not actually read from it since 2014. Maybe someday, but let’s be real, here. Dyslexia and old styles of syntax are not my friends.

5. Which book are you saving for “retirement?”

I don’t save books I want to read for a special time, so I don’t know that I have an answer to this one, but Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth duet has been on the list for a very long time. It was a favorite of my mother and grandmother, and I watched the TV series and enjoyed it, but I also know that they’re long reads, with an almost saga-like feel in that they actually follow the lifespan of a cathedral’s construction, which, by the way, lasts generations.

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?

Nah. I don’t need the end of the story that bad. I don’t even know these people yet! How can I appreciate the arcs and the foreshadowing and really feel the oomph of the end of a story if I’ve already peeked? Nah, I’m patient. I’ll get there.

7. Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?

Never a waste of ink. Those people deserve to be acknowledged! Publishing a book is a team effort, from the folks who read early drafts to any publishing/editing team you may have had. Always let those folks know they matter. Readers aren’t required to read them, either, you know? If you don’t care, don’t read! But from my perspective, if somebody wrote an interesting story, I want to know a little bit more about them, where they came from, and how the story developed within them. I love acknowledgements if they actually say something or tell a story.

8. Which book character would you switch places with?

Jill Pole from The Chronicles of Narnia.

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?

I remember a summer my sister and I wound up with my paternal grandparents for a few weeks up at my family’s cabin on Lake Vermilion in the arrowhead of Minnesota. I want to say it was between sixth and seventh grade--we were in the middle of moving across the country and my parents were going ahead of us kids to find a house and dropped us with our grandparents who were already up visiting the cabin, so I guess that would have been 2002. I had the summer reading list for the new school I’d be attending when we got where we were going and literally none of them sounded interesting. I picked The Phantom Tollbooth on random, and it has since become one of my very favorite books. I must have been the pre-teen from hell that summer; I kept laughing and having my mind blown and reading sections aloud to my sister--a much more avid bookworm than me--who was also reading for her summer list. I’m sure she was very annoyed with me.

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.

All of my books have either been ones I’ve bought or ones others have bought and gifted to me for birthdays or Christmases, so there aren’t really any interesting stories. My copy of Haints came from the publishers since I’d edited it; Dorrie and the Blue Witch was given to me after my cat passed away since he was named after the cat in that series.

I do have a set of all the Deltora Quest books that I believe my sister actually bought from Scholastic book fairs at school, but I kind of adhered to them more than she did. We moved every two years growing up, and on-base housing is small, so we couldn’t always have all our books out at each place we moved, so we would go through and pick out books for one small bookshelf each to have in our rooms for the two years we lived there, and then the next place we moved, we’d pick other books, kind of rotating through what we had available at any given place. Eventually, the Deltora books came to live on my shelves instead of hers, and when she moved away to college and eventually got married and didn’t come back home to live anymore, I asked her if she wanted them back. She didn’t really remember they’d been hers. So I kind of absconded with those.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

Not my own copies, no. But I did give my cousin a new copy of The Amulet of Samarkand for Christmas one year, and on the following year a line item appeared on his wishlist: “Any book Pear recommends.”

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?

The Firebirds and Young Warriors anthologies have always been my go-tos for taking with me places. Their stories are short and satisfying so that if I don’t get all the way through the book during my trip, it’s okay. I can choose a story from them that I love to read again during the evenings and I don’t have to commit to finishing the book. Otherwise, these days, whatever’s on my Kindle comes with me for space reasons.

13. Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?

While I’m not yet 10 years our of high school, in the spirit of the question, I’ve never gone back to read any of those I hated that were required reading. There are too many other books to try and favorites to find. I do have a couple on my shelves that I did like.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

Nothing particularly strange. News clippings pertaining to the book, the Scholastic order form I just found, post cards from my dad while he’s been deployed, old bookmarks I’ve made.

15. Used or brand new?

While I love seeing used books and guessing their stories, I prefer to get myself new ones so that I can watch my own book’s story grow in its pages.

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

I admit. I’ve never read a single Stephen King book, nor am I interested in doing so. I have no opinion except that I’m tired of seeing his name. I’m glad he’s found success. I do not appreciate that he’s labeled the end-all-be-all of writing success.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

Better than, no; as good as, yes. The Cadfael miniseries is A+; To Kill a Mockingbird is fantastic; and the two incarnations of Howl’s Moving Castle are very different beasts that are both lovely. But all of those are stories that I also enjoyed. I mean, I’m sure there are some movies of classics that would beat slogging through the reading of it all to heck.

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?

The Dark is Rising, Inkheart, and The Golden Compass all deserved better. Frankly, I’m pleased The Dark is Rising movie has vanished from collective consciousness because those books are delightful and that movie was the worst adaptation I’ve ever witnessed.

19. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

Not that I remember. Reading descriptions of food doesn’t do anything for me, not even on menus.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?

I never always take advice from anyone on anything, but I do take my sister’s opinion into account. My preferences are fickle and not even I can explain them well enough to always take advice from someone.

Tagging: @ancient-trees, @roselinproductions, @sapphicaquarius, & @panhasablog!