My resolve broke a few weeks ago and I went on a small ordering spree, which has been slowly trickling in here and there. Today though I got 3 books at all once, and one of them a special edition I’m excited about.
Oops. I meant to crop that. Anyway, that Pride and Prejudice is the new Chronicle Books edition, which includes the 19 letters as actually letters, hand written and folded, each inserted into a glycine envelope bound in with the text block where the letter is relevant.
The folding freaked me out a bit as they’re definitely hand folded in a complicated tucked-into-itself fashion that had me a little stressed about unfolding them without damaging anything. Once you get the hand of it, it’s easy, and they’re so well done with postmarks and scratch outs.
Now, I want to read Pride and Prejudice again. After Halloween Bingo.
URL Phantomhive posted this first, reminding me of a time when these had a bit of a vogue on BookLikes. They were a lot of fun, and so without further ado:
Do you have a certain place at home for reading?
Although I’ll read anywhere, I do have a certain place for reading. We just completed a ‘renovation’ of sorts of the room we call a library, and it has one of those huge bean bags, with a bean bag arm rest and a bean bag footstool, snugged into a corner. It’s a really small room, and the bean bag is what fits – and it’s pretty comfy too.
With spring on its way here in Australia, I’ll also do a fair amount of reading outside in the garden.
Can you just stop reading or do you have to stop after a chapter/ a certain amount of pages?
I really, really want to stop at the end of a chapter. If I really can’t make it until the next chapter for whatever reason, I’ll stop at the end of a scene. Failing that, I’ll absolutely insist on finishing the paragraph.
Bookmark or random piece of paper?
I will use just about anything for a bookmark (that doesn’t damage the book, of course), although I have accumulated a shocking number of bookstore bookmarks over the years. As you can see, I have a bag on the wall of my library filled with all the bookmarks I currently have on hand (that aren’t floating around the house, or in a book). Before this accumulation, when I traveled full time for work, my bookmarks were all boarding passes and subway/train/bus tickets. It’s fun to come across one still stuck in the books on my shelves.
Multitasking: Music or TV while reading?
I’ve heard tell of this magic called multitasking, but I’ve never experienced it myself. I’m pathologically unable to focus on more than one thing at a time, with a very limited exceptions: I can read while classical music is playing, or if MT is watching sports – and only then when the announcers are dull as dishwater. If they are of the inane variety, my concentration is shot, and I must mock their stupidity with a passion that probably doesn’t enhance MT’s enjoyment of the game much.
So, really, no. No music or TV.
Do you eat or drink while reading?
I always, always have iced tea within arms reach. It’s a cultural DNA thing. I will snack while reading if it’s something that I can snack on that won’t risk staining my book, but eating a meal? No – see “I can’t multitask”, above.
Reading at home or everywhere?
Everywhere, anywhere. MT stopped inviting me to soccer matches after I tried to bring a book. Because even though I can’t multitask at all, I am the gold medal champion of tuning out the world* when focused on something – especially a good book.
*this would seem to be contradictory to my inability to listen to music, but close as I can figure, it’s because the music is (with the exception of classical) a repetitious thing, both in melody and lyrics and my brain seems to latch on, and get stuck to, the repetition.
One book at a time or several at once?
Generally, I prefer to have one fiction and one non-fiction read going at the same time. I’m a mood reader, but my lack of multi-tasking makes it hard to jump story trains; when I need a break from whatever fiction I’m reading, the non-fiction is just the thing. When the world was different and we were allowed to actually leave our house, I’d also have an audiobook on the go.
Reading out loud or silently in your head?
Silently – definitely silently. Unless it’s an excellent non-fiction read and I’m compelled to read parts out loud to MT, who’d really rather I didn’t. I don’t really read aloud very well to be honest. I lack any performing flair.
Also, I do actually read inside my head – there’s a definite internal narrator. I mention this because someone on BookLikes – I don’t remember who – mentioned that they don’t ‘hear’ the book in their head when they read it. When I mentioned this to MT, he said he doesn’t either. He just sees the words; there’s no corresponding internal ‘voice’ that says them. I don’t know how this works, I can’t wrap my head around it. But it explains why MT reads stupidly fast yet still manages to retain it. Which I try not to hold against him, because I think I’d miss that internal voice if it disappeared.
Do you read ahead or even skip pages?
Only if the book is stressing me out. Knowing the ending won’t ruin the story, and in fact, if I can relieve the anxiety I’m experiencing, I’ll enjoy the story even more. I will also happily skip swaths of expository dialog that I think are extraneous or irritating.
Breaking the spine or keeping it like new?
While I love old books and love that they look well-read, I read new books with every effort to make it look like they’ve never been opened. I’ve been known to cry out in existential pain when I see MT crack open a new paperback, pressing the cover open.
Saying that, my favorite book is an old paperback that is held together with a rubber band.
Do you write in your books?
I don’t judge those that do coughBrokenTune*cough, and I’ve been known to get giddy about marginalia when I stumble upon it, but me, myself? Oh hell no. If I can’t crack a spine can you imagine me trying to write in a book?
A few years ago, I found a book at the library for sale for $1 – all the worlds birds in one giant, bound checklist. It was a completely unmarked copy, and I love it. And it’s designed to be written in – you check off the birds you’ve seen and enter in the date and location of where you saw it. I manage it, but I do it in pencil. Lightly. Because it’s a book.
If you feel like sharing some of your reading habits, consider yourself tagged or let me know in the comments!
Yesterday was our first nice weather day, with a high of 21C (70F) and full sunshine. We’re still in total lockdown, but the government amended the rules a few weeks ago to allow us to drive to our exercise, as long as it’s within 5km, so I dragged MT out to a new-to-us park known as Willsmere Park or Kew Billabong. For those who may not know, a billabong is a backwater or stagnant pool, made by water flowing from a main stream or river during a flood. We had no idea it was there until recently, and it’s lovely. We got there ‘early’ by MT’s standards, a bit later than I wanted to, but in time to have the park to ourselves for about 45 minutes, before everyone else in a 5km radius descended.
I didn’t get a lot of pictures, mostly because we were busy checking out the lay of the land at first, and then, well… people. But we did chat (at a distance) with a lovely woman for whom the park was obviously her ‘local’, and she pointed out a pair of Tawny Frogmouths sleeping off the day, though one woke up long enough to shuffle his feathers and sun himself for a moment before dozing back off.
She also pointed out a nesting box for a pair of sugar gliders and told us if we were there at dusk we’d have half a chance of seeing them depart the box. Guess where we’ll be at dusk sooner rather than later? (Sugar gliders, if you’re unfamiliar with them, are the cutest damn tiny possums that fit in the palm of your hand.)
We’re only allowed to be out a couple of hours a day, and by the time I’d done the circuit there were hoards of people socially distancing, and cyclists trying their hardest to thin the herds (a major bike path goes through the park), so we headed back to the lot in time to see that it wasn’t only the humans enjoying the sunshine and cavorting in the spring weather:
I suspect, if you asked the neighborhood dogs, they’d say that water bowl was for them, but I doubt any of them would try to tell the cockatoos that.
My friend URL Phantomhive did a Book Spine Poetry challenge for the recent BoutofBooks, and it since we’re in a stage 4 lockdown here, I thought MT might enjoy the challenge. 7 POEMS LATER… Obviously, he really got into it, so I’m posting one every few days to share with everybody
Today’s is one of his longer ones:
Speaking in Tongues Why the Dutch are Different, The Year of Living Danishly A Thousand Days in Venice, A Thousand Days in Tuscany True Blue, Fair Dinkum Down Under, Consider the Platypus That’s Not English, Greek to Me
(nb: the text above is as he wrote the poem originally; he wanted to make sure it was posted because he found the arrangement of books confining. )
I stumbled across an article about a pair of Peregrine Falcons nesting in downtown Melbourne today, and it included a link to a live cam feed of their nesting box. I can’t stop watching it.
I think it’s the camera quality that’s keeping me glued to the feed. That and somebody is actively controlling it, so occasionally it zooms in and it’s just too cool.
My friend URL Phantomhive did a Book Spine Poetry for the recent BoutofBooks, and it got me thinking “MT would be good at this.” (My husband is the talented writer in this house.) Since we’re in a stage 4 lockdown at the moment, and it’s been raining consistently all day, I thought he might enjoy the challenge and he’d come up with a quick, pithy example I could share with you all.
Well. I mentioned it last night and then didn’t think much more about it, until I noticed him walking around the house this morning, making lists. Moving stacks of books around. Pecking away at his laptop.
7 POEMS LATER…
So here’s the first one – and my personal favorite. Also, the shortest. Some of the results are less quick poems and more epic adventures. But one at a time … 😉
Fucking Apostrophes,
You’re saying it wrong,
Holy Sh*t
Swearing is good for you
It’s not Wordsworth, but it make me smile and I agree with the sentiment. 😉
What I believe are the last of my posts currently on BookLikes are importing to my WP site. Being a nerd has its advantages, and I used wget to scrape my BookLikes site of all my posts. From there I extracted the titles, posts, post dates and tags into a .csv file and used an importer plug-in to import the csv. It soulds straightforward, but it took a lot of hours because of fiddly clean up stuff, and the Festive Tasks posts just about broke my will to live. But it’s done. No images – yet. And they’re all sitting in draft, because who knows how god-awful unreadable they are the moment, but I now have no excuses for boredom should the lockdown continue. Although we’re binge re-watching The West Wing – you know, so I can remind myself what a less dysfunctional America looked like – so that’s a mighty competitor for my time.
Further good news is I should be able to use these files to update my LibraryThing too. whew.
So, with the way things are going over at BookLikes, I’ve dragged myself kicking and spitting back over to my blog, and have spent at least the last two weeks swearing at WordPress and the dearth of plug-ins that do what I want done. WordPress has been such a pain in my ass that I’ve been *this* close to building my own damn database a couple of times, but finally, a few days ago, I stumbled across a Pay plug in called Book Library, created by someone called Nose Graze. It does both more and less than what I want it to do, but mostly more. It allows me to build my own book database, though I can’t bulk upload; it tracks my reading, though I haven’t figured out how to do pages over percentages, and the widget lacks a progress bar; and it allows me to track multiple editions, multiple reads, and purchase dates and locations. Oh! and series. So it’s more win than loss, but I still find WP clunky as hell.
I’m still using BookLikes when it will allow me, and I hold out some hope that someone will, someday, see the value in what’s there. If I could buy it, I would, but I can’t even justify buying books (though I was pissed off enough to buy the plug-in) so unless they give it away, I’m stuck here. It could be worse; I could be stuck with nothing but GoodReads.
Anywho, my tiny corner of the world is back in lockdown until at least mid August, because people don’t listen to what they don’t want to hear, and mistook flattening of the curve to elimination of the virus, and now it’s raging through Victoria.
After three months of not taking advantage of the first lockdown, MT and I finally got it together the second time around and have been kicking numerous home projects to the curb. Our library is finally done – pictures to follow in the next post – and today we’re getting a new toilet installed – pictures not to follow; this was NOT one of our projects, but the toilet decided it just couldn’t go on any longer – or, more specifically, the seal between it and the floor gave way and the thing was so old it wobbled. Also, my kettle is acting ominously, because nothing says Pandemic induced financial crisis like all the most crucial appliances dying at once. But the house is clean and organised, pictures are almost all hung where they should be, and my library is done – and I have empty shelves!!
We’re running out of interesting neighborhood to walk in, so we re-visited the ‘posh’ side of the street, and I at least got a few pictures in counter of all the lovely spring photos my N. Hemisphere friends are sharing, including one of a mystery tree full of little seed balls that make it look festive:
I have no idea what kind of tree it is, but now that I’ve noticed it, I’ve seen one or two on a few streets around me.
One of the prettier streets at the moment:
How the 1% live; I included it only because the blue-jacketed guy shamelessly peering through the gates is MT, counting the number of black cars parked in the driveway (6, and they were really all black).
On our way back from our last walk, we cut through the park, checking on a few trees we discovered several weeks ago. They’re peppercorn trees, and they grow everywhere here, something else I only recently discovered on these walks. After doing a LOT of research to make sure they were the edible peppercorns, not the toxic ones, we picked our first batch:
They don’t look like much, but they smell divine. Once they’re finished drying out, I’ll de-husk them and we’ll have a go at grinding them up; there’s debate on whether or not they grind in a mill well – we may have to pull out the mortar and pestle. Either way – I love the idea of a fresh supply of peppercorns; it’s an unexpected bonus to these local walks.
Although I’ll read anywhere, I do have a certain place for reading. We just completed a ‘renovation’ of sorts of the room we call a library, and it has one of those huge bean bags, with a bean bag arm rest and a bean bag footstool, snugged into a corner. It’s a really small room, and the bean bag is what fits – and it’s pretty comfy too.
I will use just about anything for a bookmark (that doesn’t damage the book, of course), although I have accumulated a shocking number of bookstore bookmarks over the years. As you can see, I have a bag on the wall of my library filled with all the bookmarks I currently have on hand (that aren’t floating around the house, or in a book). Before this accumulation, when I traveled full time for work, my bookmarks were all boarding passes and subway/train/bus tickets. It’s fun to come across one still stuck in the books on my shelves.
