I spotted this blog meme as I was surfing around, and thought it had my name ALL over it. I hope some of you (Trista, Dave, Leta, Bean…and others!) will pick up on it too.

Don’t let the number 15 stop you from playing. If you can only think of 3 things about you and books, I still want to know what they are.

1. I love love love books. Shocking news to anyone reading this, right? As far as material things go, books are the category of thing I could least live without.
2. I read faster than almost anyone I know. When I was about 11, I had a contest with my Dad to see who could read faster. The book we sped through was Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. I didn’t understand a lot of it, but I whipped through the text. Now I only whip through things if I hate them and for some reason am reading them anyway. But I still read fast.
3. Before I could actually read, like around age 2 or 3, I ate books. Specifically, I tore the corners of pages out of extra-large Richard Scarry books and ate the paper. (I now wonder if perhaps I had reflux as a very small child.)
4. The first thing I remember reading all by myself was a Nancy comic strip in the Green Sheet of the Milwaukee Journal. I remember sounding out a compound word, while sprawled out on the tv room floor.
5. In the 4th or 5th grade, my best friends Katie Moylan, Becca Goldberg, and I memorized all the dialog from the first chapter of Little Women and acted it out together on the phone. (Lucky for us, Katie had 3-way calling, an exotic feature in 1979 or 1980.) Becca was Meg, Katie was Amy, and I was Jo. (Raise your hand if you thought "of course you were.")
6. By the time I was in the 6th grade, I had read Roots by Alex Haley more than 10 times. I didn’t think that was a big deal, but my parents and teachers did. I still prefer long books, and when traveling, often use length as a factor when deciding which book to buy.
7. The story means more to me than the quality of the writing, as long as the writing doesn’t suck. (This excludes anything by Ellen Degeneres, John Norman, or Peter Dickinson, whom I believe to be some of the worst writers published in English.) I would rather read an interesting plot or characterization by a mediocre wordsmith than a beautifully written story about a topic or characters I don’t find — and can’t make myself find — interesting.
8. 2005 was the first year I tried to keep track of my reading.
9. One of the biggest reasons I disliked law school was that it drained me of the time and mental energy to read for pleasure. During my 1L year, the only personal reading I had time for was the stories and articles in the New Yorker, and I was extremely resentful of that fact.
10. On average, every other year I manage to give away 10 or 12 books. Giving them away seems painful and awful to me.
11. I re-read approximately half of the books I read, maybe more. Some of them I would re-read monthly or almost that often, except that I’m embarassed to list them every month on my blog reading list.
12. I hardly do any more "should" reading. Certainly the number of books I read because I think I should is less than 5% of my total reading.
13. I love most genre fiction: Young Adult, Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Mysteries, in particular. I like them more than most "mainstream" fiction. I’m not so much a Romance fan, although I was when I was an early teenager (12-14) and romance-reading has been a phase in my recovering from bad breakups. What I really can’t stand is Horror, and except for reading the Flowers in the Attic series when I was in 5th grade, some Stephen King in high school or college, and Poppy Z. Brite when I was in South Africa, I’ve avoided the genre entirely. It gets too far into my imagination and creeps me out for a LONG time after I’m done. Same with horror/scary movies (ie, anything directed by David Lynch). I still have too many visuals from Eraserhead burnt into by brain, and I saw that movie with Katie when we were 15. She, quite sensibly, stuck her head into the seat of the chair during the worst bits.
14. Right now, in our house, we have at least 125 linear feet of bookshelf space. (One full wall of the dining room, 96 inches tall, plus three 96 inch tall shelves in the living room, and several smaller shelves in other rooms.) Maybe 20-25 feet of that is filled with double rows of books; slightly less than that is filled with music and movies. Still, all of our books don’t fit in our shelves; they are spilling over and sitting in piles in various places around the house.
15. I almost never read book reviews. But I almost always read books that people who know me recommend to me. Philip Pullman was the best recommendation anyone has ever made to me (thank you, Sandra!); I’m still trying to get into China Mieville.