15 Things About Books

From Joke, via Badger.

1-Like Joke, I read and walk. I once fell down the stairs and ripped a hole in the knee of a favorite pair of khakis doing this (fairly recently), but I continue to do it anyway.

2-I started listening to audio books because I can’t read and run.

3-My mother insists that I learned to read while I was learning to use the toilet. She says she strapped me into a “potty chair” and left me in front of Sesame Street and The Electric Company with a bag of Oreos. (This explains more of my bad habits than you can possibly imagine, but none of them to do with reading.)

4-If I find myself in a bathroom with nothing to read, I’ll grab shampoo bottles or whatever else is near. Sometimes there's more to read than just "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." (That’s more to do with an absence of books, but I stand by it.) PS-My current bottle of conditioner says I should, "Cleanse hair with Sham-pure . . ." The stuff I wash my face with "Cleanses without drying." I think the word cleanse is ugly, and wish people would stop using it.

5-My sweet, super-young sixth grade teacher at St. Pius X loved that I loved reading and gave me a copy of Go Ask Alice. I guess she thought I was mature enough? Or she wanted to see to it that I was “scared straight”? I don’t know, but I won’t pretend it didn’t affect me. “Acid and smack/There’s no way back.” Bwah, hah, hah, hah!

6-Harriet the Spy messed me up, but good. I was devastated when the other kids read her notebooks, and I swear that from then on I’ve never written a word without having an audience in mind—even my journals are written as if I’ve been expecting someone to read them. And I still sometimes sing (in my head), “It’s time for my cake and milk, my milk and cake . . .”

7-Teddy would have been called Madeleine if he’d been a girl, because Madeleine L’Engle is the kind of woman I’d like to grow up to be.

8-I read the first Flowers in the Attic books in late grade school. I guess my mom didn’t care, because she was just glad I was reading, but . . . there’s something to be said for screening what your kids read. Yikes.

9-I think Stephen King is (or at least used to be) a good writer. I don’t care much for horror as a genre, but I’ve always said that I’d want to read about his characters in any setting.

10-I have a thing for books published in the 1950s for teenagers, especially those about manners and grooming. I used to get one in particular from the library all the time, and I remember that it encouraged you to dry yourself with a “big Turkish towel” after showering.

11-I cried when Erma Bombeck died.

12-I read the Narnia books as a kid, but didn’t have a clue about the Christian allegory until college.

13-My first real boyfriend gave me a copy of Blue Skies, No Candy (he had replaced the actual cover with one from a book about baseball), and I kept it under my bed. It was the first of that kind of reading I’d ever encountered, and I went through a period where I read it over and over and over.

14-I’m not a big Virginia Woolf fan despite my feminist tendencies. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, though, is my favorite play.

15-Joseph Conrad’s books make me swoon like a school girl over his brilliance and manliness. Hemingway can bite me with his scotch and cigars and guns and big fish. I’m not saying he wasn’t a master of the craft, but as far as manly men and their manly subjects go, Conrad kick’s Papa’s ass.