Book Survey

[gothwalk]

Because I apparently can't stop spamming your feeds once I start, here's a book survey, retrieved from the depths of Old LJ. Clean copy of the questions in the comments!

What book are you reading now? The non-fiction is one called Farmers, Consumers, Innovators: The World of Joan Thirsk, which is a sort of compiled tribute to Thirsk, and an examination of the ideas she brought to agricultural history, of which there seem to be a lot. Fiction is The Root, by Na'amen Gobert Tilahun, which is part urban fantasy, and part bizarre bio-magic secondary world, so far. I think it's the first in a series.

What is your favourite book? That's a really fecking difficult question. Many days, it's Diane Duane's Book of Night with Moon. Other times it's Barbara Hambly's Sorcerer's Ward (sold under the name Stranger at the Wedding in the US, for reasons I've never understood). There was a long stretch of my life wherein the AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide was the answer. I also love Ursula le Guin's Always Coming Home. And J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. And that's just this evening, there'll be others tomorrow. 

What languages do you read? Comfortably, English. I can more or less read in Irish, but it's slow. I can sort of read in French, enough for comics. And I could puzzle out German, Spanish or Italian with an appropriate dictionary. But mostly I read English.

What books have changed the way you look at the world? Luke Rhinehart's Adventures of Wim, and Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I learned not to take the world seriously from the first, and how to take the world seriously from the second. Both authors have written other, less good and in some cases outright problematic books, but those two are really worth reading, or were for me.

About how many books do you own? I own all the books in the world. Many of them are stored with other people, in bookshops, in libraries, etc, and I need to go through some rituals of payment or other supplication to get them out of storage, but I own them all. If the question is "how many books do you have in the house", my current estimate is about 3000 physical volumes, and media and devices containing about 8000 more. The physical volumes are well down from what they used to be; we've culled viciously a few times since we moved here in 2008.

How many books per month do you usually borrow from the library? I don't make much use of our local library. I would definitely use an academic library, if I had access to one with a decent history collection that I could reach via public transport, but that's not the case at the moment. When I was a kid, I usually got 8 books every week, so that'd be 32 books a month.

How much would you say you've paid in library fines in your life? Very little; I've always been good about getting the books back in time. I mean, sometimes I take them straight back out again, but they do technically go back.

Do you read in bed? Not much much any more. I used to, a lot, but these days I want to be sitting upright to read. I do read a few pages of whatever fiction I'm currently on before I sleep, most nights. 

Do you ever read while walking? Frequently. Podcasts have reduced this, but I used to navigate across Dublin on pure habit, reading all the way, and I'm still well able for it.

Do you listen to audio books? Almost never. Speech is so slow; I prefer to read. Also, text just works better for me; I parse voices by rendering what's said into mental text. So why add the extra step?

What book was the most difficult to read? Emotionally, anything with animal cruelty in it; I sometimes have to give up if it happens early in a book. In terms of comprehension, Framing the Early Middle Ages by Christopher Wickham was absolutely impossible to finish, and I had to give up. Wickham is admirably thorough, but I just couldn't take it.

Do you read every word of a book, or skip parts that don't hold your interest? I read every word until such time as I decide I'm not finishing the book, and then I stop. I pick up a lot of cheap stuff as ebooks, and sometimes they're great, and sometimes they're... not. I stopped reading one on the second page a few weeks ago; I just couldn't stomach the prose, and since it was pretty clear already the white male protagonist written by a white male author wasn't going to hold my interest, I felt no urge to turn another page.

Do you buy new or used books, paperbacks or hardbacks, leather or collector's items? Yes. I buy books, and the format doesn't matter a lot, beyond fiction in ebook form whenever I can, and non-fiction in hard copy.

Do you lend your books? Sort of. I hand books to people, I assume I'll never see them again, and I am often pleasantly surprised by someone returning one. But mostly I only lend books I can afford not to see again. Sometimes I buy extra copies to lend/give away.

What were your favorite books when you were a child? The Narnia books, until the utter betrayal of The Last Battle, a book I pretended did not exist for about a decade afterward. Thereafter the aforementioned A&D DMG. Before the literate stage, I was very keen on a book called Old Farm New Farm, and still have some weakness for that style of detailed illustration.

What children's books do you most enjoy as an adult? I am not certain whether Diane Duane's So You Want To Be A Wizard series counts. They're YA, not children's, really. But those. I've read them all multiple times, including the newly-updated-for-the-21st-century editions.

Have you ever read a book more than once? Well, see previous question. But yes, frequently, occasionally as soon as I finished it the first time. Some books - Wim, Zen and the Art - I've read more then ten, possibly more than twenty times.