Thursday, December 01, 2005

A Tag: What I Love About Books

I've been tagged by Dana for a Book Meme. Fifteen facts and personal preferences about books. Oh dear. Where to start? Now I've got to think a minute...

1) I love history books. I own tons and tons of history books, from the eighteenth century through World War II and everything in between. I never know when I'm going to get a particular story idea set in a different time period.

2) Old bookstores are AWESOME. I love to find out-of-print treasures, especially those I've been looking for for awhile.

3) I've worked at three bookstores and a library in my lifetime.

4) I want to own a used bookstore someday after I sell. That way I can have an income from the novels since used bookstores rarely make a lot of money! But I would have such a cool bookstore - like a combined coffeehouse/bookstore.

5) I used to be very obsessive about my books. I kept them in pristine condition. I NEVER bent pages. If the cover got bent, I would about blow a gasket. (This was all pre-marriage and pre-kids, of course).

6) I used to keep a list of all the books I'd read (and I still have it somewhere) and I'd give every book a rating.

7) My husband and I share a common love for books. Our basement walls are literally lined with bookshelves. When we move, it's really going to suck. ;-)

8) You can ALWAYS get me a book for Christmas or my birthday! I can never have enough.

9) I mark the annual library booksale on my calendar and my husband actually took the day off for it!

10) I've recently started collecting the books I read as a young teenager - mostly Patricia Veryan and Rosalind Laker, two of my all-time favorites.

11) If a book doesn't capture my attention within the first few chapters, I'll move on to something else. As my husband told me, it's my time to read and I should read something I like! No need to suffer through it if it's not good.

12) The first time I walked into my undergrad college's library, I nearly fainted at all of the wonderful history books I found. Coming from a small town (1,600 people), I didn't have access to books like that. Now I have access to my university's library and our city library is great, too.

13) I love good cover art. Gorgeous, well-done covers immediately catch my attention, no matter what genre.

14) My daughter loves books, too! Every night we read a book before bedtime.

15) My brothers used to get upset with me in the summertime when they'd ask me to come play baseball with them and I'd be reading a book (I still remember reading every single Nancy Drew book and all the Wizard of Oz books during the summers). To this day, my brothers still give me a hard time about it. But I truly believe that all the reading I did as a child helped contribute to the writer I am today.

I tag Kelley, Michelle, AE, and Amy from WriteMinded.

6 comments:

  1. I agree with the cover art. No matter what the old saying tells us, if a cover is bad it's bad!

    I worry that when I sell to a publisher, I'll be such a princess about absolutely every little detail.

    It's not bad enough that I'm picky about cover art, since I've had typography training I'm picky about everything from the font to the margin size to how words at the end of a line are broken. ^_^;

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  2. Wow. I didn't even know there was such a thing as typography training!

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  3. Well, our instructor was really into typography, so he made it his goal to ensure we all knew how to set good type before we finished the program.

    Mostly it's things like how to format text and learning about fonts and getting a feel for which font is appropriate for what you're doing.

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  4. Awesome, Melissa!

    I love walking into a book store or a library and SMELLING! I know, I'm weird.

    You should feel lucky though, at least your brothers WANTED you to play with them. Mine could care less as long as I wasn't tagging along.

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  5. Anonymous11:44 AM

    If I ever worked in a bookstore for a living, I'd be broke! :) Too much temptation.

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  6. Michelle, I worked for a week at a used bookstore for one of my friends while she went out of town for vacation. She said she couldn't pay me a lot in cash, but to take as many books as I wanted. Talk about perks!!!

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