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me and books
12/14/2005 = 04:57 PM

Fifteen Facts about Me and Books:

A meme that's been making the rounds. I'm not tagging anyone, but have at it if you feel so inclined.

1. I learned to read at the age of three. The Mom didn't know I could read till one day, she was watching a game show (quiz show if you're a non-Yank) and had her back turned so she could play it "the hard way" (not looking at the answer flashed at the bottom of the screen). I was worried she'd miss seeing the answer, so I read it to her. In retrospect, I imagine that was quite a shock to her.
2. The very last summer my grampa was alive, we stayed at my grandparents' house. Every night, we'd all pile onto the big bed and the Mom would read a chapter of Heidi or Little Women.
3. I loved any books with animals. Richard Scarry was my favorite author. My favorite of his books was What Do People Do All Day? But my brother had Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, and you couldn't deny that Goldbug rocked socks.
4. I once circled all the capitalized words in The Charlie Brown Dictionary so I could go back and ask the Mom why certain ones were capitalized and other ones weren't. I learned three things that day.
   1. You must never, ever, write in books that are not specially designated as workbooks. Ever.
   2. The harder you press down with your pencil when you circle things, the longer it takes to erase every single mark from the book. And your mom won't answer any questions till you clean up the book you wrote in.
   3. Words get capitalized at the beginnings of sentences, even if they're not people's names. And the letter i gets capitalized if it's referring to yourself.
5. I liked to sit on the floor of the school library, dirty as it was, with my back to the biography shelf, reach behind me, pick a biography without looking, and read it, no matter whose it was. My favorite was Eleanor Roosevelt, but I also liked Virgil I. Grissom, though it was very scary and sad at the end.
6. I cried when I read Charlotte's Web. It was the first time a book had made me cry. It wouldn't be the last.
7. I saw the Disney version of Mary Poppins and was ripping pissed that they had strayed so far from the book. I would have been perfectly happy if they'd cut out the song about the spoonsful of sugar and put in the bit about Bad Tuesday. I did, however, like the penguins, despite the fact they weren't in the book whatsoever.
8. I have the Mom's copy of Rex Stout's Triple Jeopardy, a collection of three Nero Wolfe novellettes, because the plots were (and are) so tight, yet the writing voice switched back and forth so effortlessly, from Archie Goodwin's hard-boiled narration to Wolfe's erudite deductions, that you forget that neither Goodwin nor Wolfe are real people having a conversation; rather, they are merely the brain-children of a third party with a typewriter and a marvelous imagination. I want to do that someday.
9. I met a boy, and he was So. Cute. We got to talking and I really liked him. Then he said, "I don't like books. I read Spy Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, but that's pretty much it." That's when I noticed he wasn't really all that cute.
10. Another boy once gave me a stack of paperbacks he'd gotten somewhere, because there was some science fiction with them, and he knew I liked those. All the Dunes were in the stack, which was a tremendous score, but there was also a small book of short stories called Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson. Spider opened Callahan's Place in his mind, and just wrote down the adventures for the rest of us, but that didn't stop me from looking all over Suffolk County for it. I have since found it. There's a branch of the Place in my own mind, better than Spider's (because I'm one of the patrons) and they always have Unibroue and Chimay on tap. (I miss that particular boy.)
11. Whenever I hear someone say, "I don't like Stephen King because I don't read horror stories," I know that what they really mean is, "I've never read anything by Stephen King and cannot offer an informed opinion." Saying that Stephen King only writes horror is like saying Radio City Music Hall only features the Rockettes — just because that's what they're best known for doesn't mean that's all they do.
12. That Man of Mine bought me a boxed set of A Wrinkle in Time and all of its sequels as a wedding present. The diamond ring was nice and all, but I will always, always love A Wrinkle in Time, even if it is a "children's book."
13. I read cookbooks for entertainment. I rarely pull one off the shelf to look up a recipe, because when I do, I get engrossed, and forget to cook anything.
14. Terry Pratchett does such fun things with language, I'm more apt to laugh out loud at a turn of phrase than I am at a plot development.
15. When my copy of The Half-Blood Prince arrived, That Man of Mine poked fun of me because, before I started reading it, I hugged it, smelled it, and waved it in the air whilst squealing. If I die before J.K. Rowling publishes the final installment of the Harry Potter series, I won't need to go to Hell — that will be punishment enough for all of my life's sins.

New comic:

http://www.stripcreator.com/comics/golfwidow/328114

The monkey on the left is Sprite. That's why we're in his classroom.

Look, I know it isn't as clever as yesterday's. By way of apology, I offer this, which I ganked from Dave Feldman, who ganked it from someone else.

Click to view full-size

drinking: coffee
listening to: Jaguar Wright, Let Me Be the One
craving: kabob from the turkish place