15 Facts About Books and Myself:
1. I do not recall being unable to read. To this day my grandmother recalls telling me, when I was about two years old, that the title of a magazine was one thing. I apparently looked at her quite seriously and said, "No, Grandma, it says 'Country Living'" or some such.
2. Appropriately enough, my very first steps were in a library. The apocryphal telling goes that I was about 12-14 months old and desperate to reach the shelves with the glorious books. And damnit, I did. Don't come between a bibliophile and a bookshelf, yo.
3. One of the very first adult books I read was Joyce Carol Oates' "We Were the Mulvaneys". I remember that I read it in secret in the basement, thinking that I would get in trouble for the frank portrayal of sexuality. I was about ten years old.
4. My entire life until adulthood featured a prominent battle betwixt my parents and myself. They would put me to bed and I would stuff a towel or blanket in the crack under the door so that no light would shine through as I stayed up reading. If they woke up and caught me, I then turned the brightness of the numerals of my alarm clock up as high as possible and read by the faint glow of green clock light. I got through The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Amber that way. Undoubtedly destroyed a bit of eyesight too. You win some...
5. There are very few books upon my shelves that I loathe. The few include Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein. I have been twenty pages from the end of Wuthering Heights for almost the past five years and have no intention of ever forcing the blasted thing upon myself again. Curse you, Emily.
6. About half of my collection is second-hand and I daresay a fourth has been purchased within the past year. It's small thus far, coming in only around five hundred, but it's growing rapidly and is flowing onto the floor.
7. I feel awful if I set down a book and do not finish it. This means that I nearly always have about fifteen books I'm currently reading, as I keep plugging away at the dreadfully boring ones. Currently, said books in the process are Soul Music, Foucault's Pendulum, China: A New History, Shakespeare's Kings, The Memoirs of Cleopatra, and Crime and Punishment- among others I've forgotten.
8. The single book I quote most often is Janet Fitch's White Oleander, as I'm terribly in love with the way it's written. I see Astrid in myself, to the point of having selected that for my German name in senior year of high school. Don't judge it by the atrocious film, please.
9. One of my dearest wishes is a beautifully bound facsimile of the First Folio. I suspect that it will be a gift to myself upon completion of my degree.
10. I never liked the Sweet Valley High series but pounded down hundreds of The Babysitters' Club books. Unfortunately, I still recall some of the plotlines. My brain, it bleeds.
11. As a child, I hid my copy of The Velveteen Rabbit underneath my bed as I found it horribly depressing and would cry everytime. Same goes for The Christmas Day Kitten.
12. I often got into trouble for reading during recess, always by some frightening woman in a tracksuit with her hands on her hips and the cliche whistle. She never appreciated the irony of being punished for reading at school. (I spent a good deal of time in detention in the fourth and fifth grades. This amounted to spending the lunch period in a quiet room with the option of doing homework or peacefully reading a book. Exploiting the system, what? Also, this was first place I believe I met my best friend, Lady Jane Grey, doing precisely the same thing.)
13. I have a soft spot for historical novels, no matter how awful.
14. I try to acquire the illustrations that accompany my favorite literature - namely Beardsley's work for The Rape of the Lock and Salome; Dore's work for Paradise Lost and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the Waterhouse paintings for Tennyson's Arthurian poems.
15. Hamlet will always be the closest to my heart.
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in our philosophy."
- Hamlet, Act I, Scene v.
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