Books on the Brain

Stolen from Roger:

1. Do you remember learning to read? How old were you?
I do. As a toddler I watched The Electric Company incessantly and picked up a lot of how to read from it, along with, to a lesser degree, Sesame Street. I also had a father who read to me in Sesame Street voices. When I was three my father would sit me on the counter at his deli and have me read the front page of the Daily News to customers to impress them.

2. What do you find most challenging to read?
Old novels - every time I get ambitious and try to read a classic author - even someone like Dickens - I find that the stylistic and structural differences in how we write a sentence now versus how they wrote sentences then stymie me.

3. What are your library habits?
I order a lot online for me and take the kids once a month or so to get books for them.

4. Have your library habits changed since you were younger?
Definitely - as a kid I went at least once a week, maybe more, and then primarily to browse and get books to read (and at times for research).

5. How has blogging changed your reading life?
Hasn't much. I do most of my reading in environments where computers are not to be found - on trains, in bed, in waiting rooms. I'll find the odd book I might not have otherwise, but still get most of my reading recommendations from newspapers, magazines, and what i know my own interests to be.

6. What percentage of your books do you get from:
New book stores - 20%
Second-hand book stores - 10%
The library - 50%
Online exchange sites - 0%
Online retailers - 10%
Gifts - 10%

7. How often do you read a book and NOT review it in your blog?
Often. If I find I'm not burning to share anything about it I usually don't.

8. What are your pet peeves about ways people abuse books?
Don't have any. Books, for me, are for reading, not protecting. I'd rather a book be read, and dog-eared, rumpled, torn, or damaged, than unread and pristine.

9. Do you ever read for pleasure at work?
Occasionally at lunch, mostly the newspaper.

10. When you give people books as gifts, how do you decide what to give them?
A combination of "they like topic A" and "this looks like a really good book on topic A)"

Until Whenever