25 things about me and books

1. I love to read. I used to read novels, and especially science fiction, but now I read more poetry and memoir.
2. I read every night at bedtime.
3. I have been keeping a list of every book I buy and read since 1984. No doubt later when I’m famous, my critics will thank me for this.
4. I only heard the word bibliotherapy recently, but it really works for me. Have a problem? Want to figure out how you feel about something? Read a book about it.
5. I almost always sit down and read a book straight through in a sitting or two.
6. I have had to really slow down on reading new books since I had kids.
7. But I still reread a lot. In fact, I have always loved to reread books. It’s like hanging out with old friends.
8. For years I read the Lord of the Rings books during final exams, because I could pick them up and put them down since I already knew who died and whatnot.
9. I still love LOTR, but I can’t believe how long it took me to notice how there were practically no women in that whole universe. And even the few the Fellowship ran into were really annoying.
10. I want to buy almost every book I see. Only the prospect of being in debt eternally has helped me finally develop the discipline not to do so. But I’m still having lots of trouble with that whole concept.
11. Sometimes if I’m really good I will force myself not to buy a book I find at the bookstore, but to come home and order it from Amazon for cheaper instead.
12. Or sometimes I’ll just put it in my shopping cart to buy later.
13. I have 27 items in my shopping cart. The oldest is Calm, Cool, and Collected by Carolyn Kizer.
14. That doesn’t include the 23 items in my Amazon wish list (which I’m not linking to, thank you very much, because you aren’t going to buy me anything anyhow, and besides, I’m anonymous).
15. Only one person in my family buys me stuff from my wish list, and I really love her.
16. I have such a hard time in bookstores. Often I just can hardly stop myself from buying it right then and there. My husband can tell you that I am not into delayed gratification.
17. If I do order a book from Amazon that I saw in the bookstore, I feel guilty if it was Joseph Beth or the Happy Bookseller, but not if it’s Barnes and Noble. Stupid chains.
18. If I’m really really good, and I think I might not read it but once, sometimes I’ll order the book from my campus’s interlibrary loan instead.
19. The last book I did that with was Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched Religion; I’m glad I didn’t buy it.
20. Sometimes I’ll order a book from interlibrary loan and have to buy it while I’m reading it. The last two books I did this with were Sue Monk Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter and Carol Goodman’s The Lake of Dead Languages.
21. Because I am an English professor, I consider it a professional obligation to read cultural phenomenon books.
22. So I read the first of the Left Behind books before I left the rest of them behind happily (try C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters if you want real apocalyptic religious writing).
23. And I have been going to every midnight Harry Potter book party I can find since I first ran across a mention of The Sorcerer’s Stone in Newsweek years ago.
24. I read the fifth Harry Potter book the day it was released. That book was 870 pages. Whew.
25. I can’t list my favorite books or authors. It would kill me. Right now, though, I’m reading A Wrinkle in Time to my ten-year old, and I love it. We had to read two chapters last night. And then of course there’s Ursula Le Guin!

The FedEx truck just this very minute I swear pulled up in my driveway with one of my Christmas Amazon packages! (And no, I usually use the free SuperSaver shipping and wait for days and days anxiously, but apparently Amazon could sense how painful this was for me during the holidays and they gave me a free two-month membership in their Prime program with FREE TWO DAY SHIPPING!). A book for Will, a book for my mother’s birthday, a little dodad for my husband’s stocking (and one for mine). Christmas is an Amazon box.