Reading Tastes

Have your book-tastes changed over the years? More fiction? Less? Books that are darker and more serious? Lighter and more frivolous? Challenging? Easy? How-to books over novels? Mysteries over Romance?

I probably wouldn't say that my tastes have changed per se, more like refined.

Authors I like get collected to a degree, books that are "important" find a place on my library and there is a wider range of authors and styles available to me.

I don't dismiss the frivolous - I love my Agatha Christies and read 20 - 30 of them each year. My range of Australian authors is growing. My cookbooks now probably make up 50% of my library.

I also get to read books chosen by a friend who manages to surprise me every time with something new and exciting.

Booking Through Thursday

What is reading, anyway? Novels, comics, graphic novels, manga, e-books, audiobooks — which of these is reading these days? Are they all reading? Only some of them? What are your personal qualifications for something to be “reading” — why? If something isn’t reading, why not? Does it matter? Does it impact your desire to sample a source if you find out a premise you liked the sound of is in a format you don’t consider to be reading? Share your personal definition of reading, and how you came to have that stance.

On the simplest level, reading is reading anything with words on it. I read newspapers and fiction and cook books and biographies and ... well anything I can lay my hands on.

Having said that I do try and read at least 12 "real" book each year. By "real" books I mean books that have been nominated for the Booker, Nobel or similar Prizes. I choose these because they take me outside my comfort level of things that I might choose without really thinking - I heard a good review, it is in my library or whatever. And no I don't always make my goal but it is a goal nonetheless :-)

I also have a wonderful friend that shares her choices with me - and although I love them all, they aren't books that I would have necessarily chosen for myself. At the moment I am finishing "The Women of Deh Koh" by Erike Friedl. Like the "real" books, my friend's choices challenge my mind.

Knowing that others do not necessarily share my passion for reading, I will celebrate them reading anything - comics, women's magazines, Mills and Boons. Let's face it, you have to pick up the passion somehow :-)

Booking Through Thursday

Booking Through Thursday

Scenario: You’ve just bought some complicated gadget home . . . do you read the accompanying documentation? Or not?

Do you ever read manuals?

How-to books?

Self-help guides?

Anything at all?

I read the manual before I played with my new camera, I didn't read the manuals for various kitchen gadets...

My "how to" books are recipe books - or those on food technology - which I read constantly...

I have certainly read my share of self help guides - the latest is "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying"...

I read anything and everything :-)

Booking Through Thursday

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

I have a number of writing books and various dictionaries in my library. My "but" is that they are in my library in Western Australia and I haven't been able to bring the over here yet (yes I know the story is getting old). So I have 4 online dictionaries I consult most days as well as using online services for grammar and punctuation. I also take books from the library on those exact subjects. I love 'em :-)

Booking Through Thursday

Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do?? And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember….

First option: buy the papers
Second option: buy a book - not a trashy one, maybe a book on politics or philosophy or a cook book or all three

Booking Through Thursday

Book Challenge

I’ve always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they’ve never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?

I try and figure out the meaning from the context, or the actual structure of the word (simple example biology - bio and ology). Nonetheless, I end up heading to the dictionary/google before I go any further :-)

New Challenge

I have just found a new challenge for Thursday - appropriately called Booking Through Thursday. I have done their challenge for this week so I have randomly selected an old one to start with :-)

What’s your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody “knows” those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, “Huh? Never heard of it?”

I probably have a thousand I could add here - well a dozen anyway - but to narrow down the list:

Cane River by Lalita Tademy
The Color of Water by James McBride
The American Woman's Cookbook

Ask me tomorrow and I may have a new list :-)