How Do You Read?

Voted 'do what I feel' since I sometimes follow patterns and sometimes don't. It can be very random at times what grabs me.

I read whatever looks tolerable that I find for free on the "take shelf" at work. I've been out of anything good for a long time but owe the library too much money and it's only open one day a week that I can go.

I just made it a poll because people like polls, I am mainly interested in what the patterns are. I think it was two years ago I read "only books in translation" for a year & it completely opened up a whole world of stuff for me since looking at my list it seemed I never read anything in translation; now it still comprises a lot of my reading. interested in what sorts of "I'll focus on this now" patterns people get into

holler at me if you ever need a couple of books Laurel, there's loads around here and I come from a long line of men who are incapable of not buying more books whether or not they have room for them or time to read them

the order in which i read things these days depends greatly on when i am going to have to return the books to the library

i have these grand schematic aspirations of cycling fiction, nonfiction, and drama, but generally i end up alternating stupid midlist bookstore fiction w/ something of substance, whether that something of substance is fiction, non, drama, or whatever else is actually of merit.

Whose bright fucking idea was it to shut the library on SUNDAYS, when working people and Orthodox Jews can go?? Way to save money by being a jerk/pissing everyone off, Brooklyn.

about 25% of books i read are stuff i picked off the shelf while walking through library shelves, though usually with a topic or author in mind. which is why it makes me mad that the library i go to puts only a minority of its fiction collection on shelves and most of it is newer/contemporary stuff i'm not interested in. so it's more likely now that i have to ask a librarian to go get it. annoying.
10% is read because i feel like i should. stuff i never got to read in school
the rest is whatever appeals most, probably.

well there is also about 10-15% nonfiction about topics i want to know more about, like criminology and philosophy stuff, and history

My pattern is to mix it up. Whilst mixing it up I usually stick within the boundaries of poetry, literature, history, classics, essays, popularized science, travel, and humor, with the rare bit of popular fiction tossed in from time to time. I tend to favor a memoir over a biography, but neither very often.

So, I guess "I read what I fancy" (aka I do what I feel) comes closest.

you know what's the worst? the seattle public library book return system. the book drop is closed during non-business hours. what the fuck, seattle? what the fuck indeed? one night i had really bad insomnia and decided to walk back a bunch of DVDs at like 5:30 in the morning... EXCEPT the DROP WAS CLOSED and a DRUNK YELLING HOBO made fun of me for trying to return my titles. then i got a late fee, because I didn't feel like walking back at whatever NAZI TRAIN SCHEDULE TIME SPL had decided i was to bring back my stuff. Jerks.

now i live in boston.

(not that it's too proud or respectable of a list, but here is what i've read cover-to-cover this year

didn't work. here, instead:

General Fiction:

The Quiet Girl – Peter Hoeg
Ferdydurke – Witold Gombrowitz
Book of Lost Things – John Connolly
The Solitudes (Ægypt Cycle Vol 1.) – John Crowley
Glass Books of the Dream Eaters – Gordon Dahlquist
Monsters of Templeton – Lauren Groff
Little Bee – Chris Cleve
City of Thieves – David Benioff
Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England – Brock Clark
Geek Love – Katherine Dunn *
Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon
The Beautiful North – Luis Alberto Urrea
I Served the King of England – Bohumil Hrabal *
Too Loud a Solitude – Bohumil Hrabal *
Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon *
Angels Game – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Magicians – Lev Grossman
Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
Pharmakon – Dirk Wittenborn
Death of Bunny Munro – Nick Cave
Dangerous Laughter – Stephen Millhauser *
Trip to the Stars – Nicholas Christopher *
Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood *
Genre

Shutter Island – Dennis Lehane
Perdido Street Station – China Mieville *
City and the City – China Mieville
Sidetracked – Henning Mankell
Who Killed Art Deco? – Chuck Barris
Nobody Move – Denis Johnson
Child 44 – Tom Rob Smith *
Young Adult / Independent Reader:

Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman
Absolutely True Diaries of A Part Time Indian – Sherman Alexie *
Lucky Breaks – Susan Patron
Ignatius McFarland: Frequenaut – Paul Feig
Ronia the Robber’s Daughter – Astrid Lindgren
Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
When You Reach Me – Rebecca Stead
Lightning Thief }
Sea of Monsters }
Titan’s Curse } – Rick Riordan
Battle of the Labyrinth }
Last Olympian }
Magician’s Elephant – Kate DiCamillo
Non-Fiction

Dreams of My Russian Summers – Andrei Makine *
Hungry Planet – Peter Menzel *
Thoreau You Don’t Know – Robert Sullivan
Appetite for Life – Noah Riley Finch
Julia Child: A Life – Laura Shapiro
Molecular Gastronomy – Herve This *
Mastering the Art of French Cooking II : – Julia Child and Simone Beck
Knife Skills – Charlie Trotter
My Life in France – Julia Child
Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen – Rick Bayless w Deann Groen Bayless and Jeanmarie Brownson
The Science of Good Food – David Joachim and Andrew Schloss
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day – Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François
Ghost Map – Stephen Johnson
About Writing: 7 Essays, 4 Letters, and 5 Interviews – Samuel R. Delany

Thanks, J0hn D! I read a lot of genre fic, though, which is mostly spurned by ILB unless they can be really really geeky about a certain sci fi auth who was so much more intelligent and wrote for a different class of reader I mean obviously. :)

have we ever talked about setting up an actual book swap? i have bazillions of pretty good titles i'd be happy to trade away. bookmooch like, but private

When I'm reading a book, I often thing, "this is awesome I should commit and read a million other books like this." It never happens though, I get distracted easily. It is very sad, I should try to summon up some willpower.

"often think" obv

I have to mix it up - I've only got so much attention span and I'll just get bored sooner or later. Also, when I enjoy one book a lot I deliberately shy away from a second: if the second is better, the first looks bad in comparison; if it's worse, the lasting memory is a bad one and it'll bring down the earlier happy experience.

I did read the whole Rabbit series in sequence earlier this year though, but that's very rare and only works because those books are pure gold.

Normally I'm pretty random in what I pick, but this year I've read over a dozen skiffy short story anthologies. It was a bit of an overdose, I don't think I'd do anything like that again.

remy's list makes me feel like a slouch, I think I read twenty books a year if I'm really kicking ass

i do what i feel. I'm reading Pedro Páramo incredibly slowly at the moment but at other times I read 2 books a week for several weeks. I also go a month or two months at a time without reading books sometimes.

hi dere I read sf and fantasy pretty much 94/7

The fact that i walk to work now and don't have two hour long bus journeys to and fro has hit me a bit.

I tend to read more and with greater interest when I'm being somewhat systematic. I got a lot of mileage out of this thread: Good Books About Music.

i am reading a lot because i have had a serious terrible writer's blocky thing going on for like 12 months, and i keep thinking that if i read something really inspiring it will make me start workign again. :(

It definitely flips back and forth. If I find something that I really like - a particular author, or subject/theme - then I'll chase down and read everything I can get my hands on around that area.

However, a great deal of my reading patterns (when I'm un- or under-employed) are not entirely up to me, they are a lot more random when I'm relying on what's in charity bookshops or in the local library. But that's often where obsessions get born, when I pick up something at a library or for 50p at Oxfam that I wouldn't otherwise read, and it triggers a new desire to slurp up knowledge about that subject.

I should really keep lists of all the books I read. I get to the point where I have forgotten, especially if they're library books. With my commute, I tend to get through about 2 books a week.

my current reading strategy is very, uh... diffuse? at any given time, I have:

- a bunch of books on my shelves
- a slightly smaller bunch of books in piles on desk/floor/wherever there's room
- a few dozen books piled up in the backseat of my minivan
- about half a dozen books in my bag
- <1 book in my pocket
- <1 book in my hands

where the probability that I will open the book and the number of pages that I will read before stopping if I do so increase linearly as one ascends through the levels. most books circulate freely between the first 4 levels, but making 'the leap' into pocket or hands generally requires exceptional circumstances (interest, novelty, attractiveness, etc.). and anything that stays in one place for too long gets moved/replaced, just to keep it interesting.

PS: needless to say, this is almost all nonfiction. mostly continental philosophy, some lit crit.
PPS: also needless to say, I rarely 'finish' a book since I have begun using this system.
PPPS: john (and any other raleigh-durham ILXors), if you ever happen to see a tan ford windstar with a faded purple bumper sticker driving around town, gimme a honk and roll down your window and I'll be happy to send some good readin' your way.

oh uh but I did read Alain Badiou's The Meaning of Sarkozy cover to cover in about two hours last week, which I thoroughly enjoyed (SPOILER ALERT: the meaning is, "fuck capitalism!!")

Just got a Sony Reader, will be interesting to see how that changes things. Currently just loading it up with freebie classics from Gutenberg.

Patterns.

Most of my reading this year has centred around literature in translation, but then I discovered that I wanted to read more about books that were published between 1910-1945. I don't think I set it out that way, I just compiled a reading list of 50-60 books in January, with the intention of wanting to read The Third Policeman (and not just At Swim Two Birds) and Death on the Instalment Plan (and not just Journey to the End of the Night), say. But then I enlarged it to double that as I was researching (unfortunately its as serious as it sounds bah) and finding more and more...but I've sadly cut about 10 or so that seem to be out-of-print or that I could not find. Needed to be done...

The list has helped me to be more single minded about my fiction reading (I was much more of a non-fiction reader). On the flip-side I'm quite vary of letting the amount of reading I've done to dictate a narrative about fiction from those periods, although I am aware I do this to an extent when researching.

ILB needs more polls, well done.

i go on jags w/certain authors (recently vs naipaul) and/or non-fiction subjects. but most of my pleasure reading is partially determined by what's available in the library and the occasional new thing my wife brings home from work. in the past a lot of my reading has been dictated by my writing though for the last year or two I've been working on something that isn't research-intensive or at least doesn't require bookresearch. I get grumpy if I don't know what I'm reading NEXT (or where my next meal is coming from).

so uh "sometimes one way & sometimes the other"

I thought that my pattern didn't go much farther than big book-small book, but looking at my list I seem to be on an "American literature of the last 50 years" thing, if that counts as a thing, which if I want to leave I should do so slowly since I'm currently reading the non-American literature of the last 50 years Autograph Man and I am finding it utterly rubbish.

I usually aim for one novel and one nonfiction at a time (nonfiction almost always being in the continentlol philosophy vein), but assigned reading and sudden impulses and such tend to ruin the latter half of the equation.

Drift, then I'll fall into a pattern: so I'll go through an aimless phase where I decide to eg reread Lolita, find out about ants or finance, finish that Jon Savage Teenage book, read the new Pynchon, etc. Some or none of these things get done; I read casually and widely. Then something will come into focus, and I'll drive into a topic, and I'll still read a few things at once, but there's more of a centre.

I probably need to harness this a bit more: I enjoy the periods of directed reading, but it's been a while since I've put them towards anything concrete & writing something tends to make me more involved, energetic, inquisitive, focussed, etc. A better reader.

I don't really go overboard on authors ever.

I almost never follow a pattern - something in me veers away as soon as I realise the theme of my reading. I can't even read two books by the same author in a row any more! Instead I hop flealike between books & genres and generally keep a few on the go at any one time so any time I flag I can pick up something else.

I might take a tip from xyzzzz__ and start making reading lists, though.

Mr. Jaq sets himself up with these admirable reading projects (all of Henry James in chronological order, all of Dostoevsky, etc). I'm all over the map. I try to alternate "trash" w/ "not trash" (e.g. that last Twilight book followed by Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop) w/ non-fiction. I do go on jags for a particular author. At least, I'll read one of their books and then go buy the rest, and sometimes read them too.

Occasional patterns - like about a year I discovered Blaise Cendrars and went looking for his books every time I went to the library, and a while ago ended up reading a whole mess of books related to the Spanish Civil War (best one - The Owl of Minerva, by Gustav Regler). But usually it's just whatever I see at the library that looks interesting. Though right now I somehow am reading two early 20th-century epics (The Man Without Qualities and Parade's End).

Generally drift, usually reading two books at once - something I started when I first started reading as a teenager, with The Myth of Sisyphus and The Picture of Dorian Gray. It's rarely intentional, but doing this can result in mutual illumination. It can of course be entirely meaningless as well, but I'm rarely a one-book-at-a-time man.

Generally it's a case of hoping whatever I'm reading will throw up further things to read, of whatever type - quite often goes fiction, or poetic or whatever, to factual.

In practice this can result in longueurs and hiatuses - the drift basically - and I'll meander along with no real coherence. That's fine of course, but I do sometimes get a little bit frustrated with it sometimes, and that's when I'll try to focus the reader a bit more.

I'm a terrible one for jags - once read about 12 Dick Francis novels in a row, that was pretty grim, I can tell you.

Heavy bouts of genre fiction will lead to a burst of ideas stuff and intellectual stimulation (false distinction in some ways, both equally enjoyable, but it works for me). That will often carry on for a while.

Touchstones as well - will regularly return to stuff I've already read - the longest running of which would be MR James, who I've been continually re-reading since I was about 12. Kingsley Amis, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Anthony Powell, Philip K Dick, Raymond Chandler, Browning, John Dickson Carr. To a certain extent they've all become comfort reading, but I regularly find new stuff when re-reading, and they remind me of things that I feel are somehow, in an indistinct way 'important'.

I have no self-control, and so have several hundred unread books, plus a pile from the library, plus a bunch I want to re-read. Whenver I finish a book, a go into the room where all of these are kept, and freeze up, paralysed for choice, for about 10 minutes, before making a random grab from the piles.

As the majority of things I buy are from charity shops, i can't really read the same authors/genres in a row. That said I did go and buy a copy of Being and Nothingness (new) today after reading The Age of Reason and The Outsider (both 2nd hand) in the past two months.

No self-control. For every Dawn Powell, Alice Munro, or Henry James I'll read in their entirety there's so many I read piecemeal. I get most of my recommendations from footnotes. On my table sits Gore Vidal's Creation[, Conor Cruise O'Brien's Edmund Burke biography, and Conversations with Tom Petty. I mean, wtf.

Conversations With Tom Petty

Why was this commissioned? Published? Bought? Read? Is it any good?

Yes, actually!

I keep a list of books that I want to read culled from tons of different sources, and I put them on hold at the library three or four at a time. So aside from there being a general overall pattern to my reading tastes, there's no real pattern to what I read, unless the library is employing a specific pattern in a very esoteric brain washing attempt designed to make me return my books on time or something. Like I accidentally read Peyton Place and We Have Always Lived in the Castle back to back, so I ended up with a "horrible small New England towns" theme.

My pattern tends to be, in retrospect, books about whatever is bugging me at the time. I never really mean to, but when I look back at the past 5 books I've read at any given point, they usually have a common theme and that theme is almost always things I want and don't have or things that are particularly pissing me off, i.e. I've been reading a bunch of road books which I didn't realize until a couple days ago coincided with the one-year anniversary of living in the same city (which is when I usually move.)

its a mixture of what i like and what i read for work

i read w/o a plan altho my reading isnt really random either i have a couple of genres that i try to keep on top of and then maybe a handful of authors ill pick up any new stuff if i see it. i also generally read the nyt and the book review and lrb and will pick up stuff that seems interesting. and then i tend to get inspired to read something if i like something similar like this summer i read all of alice munro's fiction because i reread runaway and loved it so deeply or ill become interested in contemp russian fiction which is what im mostly reading right now. also ill get interested in something and order sum books on amazon or w/e and then start up with a different interest (like books abt oceanography) and forget id order the other books and it will be a true delight when i get home and check the mail

basic its pretty chaotic but theres always some guiding interest linking the books ive read and then ones i plan on reading

great thread! lot's of interesting answers so far. personally i find the "do what i feel like" is no longer really an option for me anymore. i would get stuck in limbo between books hoping for an impossible combinatin of not-too-much-like-what-i-just-read and what-i'm-in-the-mood-for, and end up just forcing myself to start reading anything goddamnit. nowadays i try to impose some order on my reading habits; at the moment i am only reading novels written in the second half of the 20th century. also i have decided to take a break from reading long novels. this really simplifies things, given the narrower pool i don't really give a shit anymore what i feel like reading, it's like a fun project where as long as i'm getting through this self-imposed project it's worth picking up.

Themes I return to fairly frequently:

-- the end of the world, preferably climate change/nuclear apocalypse/disease outbreak
-- novels/memoirs from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, late C19th to rise of Nazis
-- American crime novels from the pulp era

I have been struggling with 'thematic' reading since the summer - I have not been able to get through more than three books or so on a certain theme without losing interest. Recently I did an LA/California theme - the 33/3rd on 'Court and Spark', Joan Didion, "Ecology of Fear" by Mike Davis and then an anthology of LA short stories. Then a grief theme: "Hazard Zones" by Keith Maillard, "The Sea" by John Banville and "The Body Artist" by Don DeLillo. I am going through an eastern European thing right now - "Balkan Ghosts" by Robert Kaplan, the "Radetsky March" by Joseph Roth and next maybe a history of "The Great Game: The Race for Empire in Central Asia." after i finish "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" by Alan Sillitoe.

But when I get through three books or so in a certain vein I get squirrley and need to find something else. From a set of new Canadian novels I will need to read a book about US nuclear weapon development, or vice versa.

I have been trying to read thematically since the summer - I read Keith Maillard's 'Difficulty at the Beginning', "Nixonland", and DeLillo's "Underworld" in a 1960s phase and really enjoyed the perspectives in sequence. but three is the max for me.

My reading habits changed when i started to keep a 'semesterly' i.e. four-month reading list in 2008. I keep all the books I read from Sept-Dec in a pile when I am done, and at the end of the four month cycle I take a picture of all the spines together so that I can always keep track of the sequence in which I read books - a constant autobiography, I guess. What it means is that I don't read things from the library and I try not to borrow books either. I have an unavoidable sense of each book as the next chapter in a narrative.

The most difficult thing for me is choosing books to take on a trip. I went to Victoria for three days this week and had to bring three different books to cover off all possibilities for what I would want when I finished "The Radetzky March." I easily spent an hour narrowing down my shelves to the books ended up bringing along. When I am within 50 pages of the end of a book I will carry a second book with me - a central fear in my life is not having a book on hand, 'just in case.'

The dilemma of choosing books for travel is probably what will eventually drive me to purchase an e-book reader of some sort. That and limiting my commuter reader to books that are 500 mass-market paperback pages or fewer. And the comfort of having a few books on hand justincase.

My new favorite bookmarks: subscription forms that tumble out of my New Yorker.

It's just occurred to me that my last post was utter hogwash. I nearly always use a bookmark - currently an Ashes ticket stub. Sorry chaps, don't know what came over me there. As you were.

Ha ha! I use an Ashes ticket stub as well!

have ripped covers I can't stand off books (Second Arden Othello, recent Penguin Lucky Jim, and ye gods, those Pynchon covers that look like Where's Wally or something)

Holy fuck! This is serious violence. A couple fo books with woeful covers, though, I have designed new ones for and put them over the top.

subscription forms that tumble out of my New Yorker

This ^^^. There are piles of them on every horizontal surface near a chair in our flat.

get grumpy if I don't know what I'm reading NEXT

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I tend to follow a pattern wuz robbed.

re. Bookmarks: at my last job the dubiously competent print shop printed 50 sheets of business cards for me, when I was moving on in abt three months time - i had asked for 50 cards total. so i ended up with about 500 business cards w/ my name, of which i have about 450 still. perfect bookmarks!

But I always use a bookmark. Either an old ticket or business card(mine or someone else's) or a tag from a bookstore. I don't think I have ever dog-eared a book and I never crack a spine.

most of the time i just dog-ear.

rage if it's a library book

i had to train myself not to go OCD about book condition, i used to get really annoyed if at p400 of a 500-page book i'd relax slightly and end up creasing the spine a little. eventually i reached a point of oh-fuck-this with it and started deliberately creasing the spines to start with. ripping covers off is next-level, though.

Oh man, it drives me nuts when the first thing I see someone do with a book is limber up and crack open the spine. The only thing worse is when it's a book I've just lent to them...

Ah well, I'll either remember the page I'm on or I'll dog-ear (wasn't there an episode of Columbo where he caught the guy based on whether the murderer used to bookmark or dog-ear a book?, btw).

I'll only use bookmarks if there is already one in a 2nd hand bought copy -- my copy of Genet's Funeral Rites (the awesome Panther ed. cover) has one, an ad for a tatoo parlour.

Should have been a poll ;-)

i almost always use train tickets for bookmarks - I like it when you pick up a book and can tell you've not read it for seven years cos there's a ticket to brighton from 2002 somewhere around the last page. But a lot of the time I'm reading on the bus or something, with multiple bags and limited manoeuvrability and about to miss my stop, so I end up having to remember the page number anyway.

Don't like dog-earing though i occasionally pencil-mark things, or write nonsense in margins: at the moment i'm reading a lot of cheap sixties paperbacks and the paper's starting to deteriorate, so if I turn a page carelessly I end up making little tears in the side, and it's utterly maddenning.

Writing/underlining on books (especially library ones) is what makes me crazy!

Can't people get a card and write the passage out?

Underlining drives me nuts, but I like marginal notes.

Writing/underlining on library books is bad and wrong and awful, yes. But writing on your own books (in pencil, never pen or highlighter) can be sort of... cute? Once i found a keats collection i'd bought as a teenager and discovered that i'd written a bunch of poems in the back, which were pretty dreadful but nevertheless kind of sweet.

most of the time i just dog-ear.

rage if it's a library book

― had died in a balloon accident several years in a ballooning accident (dyao),

heh. well i un-dog-ear them when i move on if that's any consolation

>:O

i had to train myself not to go OCD about book condition, i used to get really annoyed if at p400 of a 500-page book i'd relax slightly and end up creasing the spine a little. eventually i reached a point of oh-fuck-this with it and started deliberately creasing the spines to start with. ripping covers off is next-level, though.

oh man when I was a teenager I thought people who'd crack the spine of a paperback were the most disgusting savages even though MY DAD was one of them - I would hand him a book I was reading and he'd immediately fold it completely inside out and I'd go AAAAAHHH IT'S RUINED

i just had a thing about paper. in 10th grade math (which was like geometry proofs, i loved that, i would break out my ruler to draw right triangles) i'd do my homework super neat and if i messed up beyond what i could neatly erase or bent the paper *at all* i'd copy it over on a clean sheet. i do not have that problem anymore. my law school books are way marked up and dog-eared. but my homework remained super neat all through college and professors would tell me they photocopied it! lol. but this all has something to do with why the idea of reading from a kindle makes me go :-/. paper is cool.

I worked in a library for two years so I'm pretty sensitive to book abuse. worse is when a student returns a book with hundreds of those plastic post it stickies and it takes you like an hour to remove them. ugh

Writing/underlining on library books is bad and wrong and awful, yes. But writing on your own books (in pencil, never pen or highlighter) can be sort of... cute? Once i found a keats collection i'd bought as a teenager and discovered that i'd written a bunch of poems in the back, which were pretty dreadful but nevertheless kind of sweet.

Oh its aces when you put it like that.

I think its also directed at people who go on to sell the underlined or written book.

whole lotta commodity fetishists itt

in a books forum? say not so!

when reading books that i have shared or plan on sharing with friends i always try to make some sort of effort to leave the book with my fingerprints on it just so they can feel like they've some idea of what my experience reading it was. i've been lent books with underlinings of phrases i might otherwise have lazily overlooked that entirely changed the way i read them. or sometimes it's just to share a laugh or a shock.

an unread book in pristine condition has less value to me than a mangled used one. even if there's no marginalia or underlinings there's a great satisfaction in beholding physical evidence that someone has read it before.

^^^ I'm just the pilot, this dude's the truth bombardier

Ugh. I can't even bear to touch books with fingerprints or underlining.

I have a "Basic Writings of Nietzsche" that I left in a gym bag with a wet bathing suit for a couple days.
and then later spilled an entire cup of tea on.

(and I love it!)

my girlfriend dropped my copy of Infinite Jest and it landed really weird and the whole front cover got creased vertically right down the middle

and once when I was reading the Collected Fictions of Borges outside on a hot summer day, the cover got stained by some drops of sweat that fell on it

White Noise, Pale Fire, and Slaughterhouse-V have also been victims of the "forgotten in the gym bag with the swimsuit" hazard

and the copy of Minima Moralia that my girlfriend got me for my birthday had its spine broken already when she gave it to me, but I didn't say anything, and now I've sorta grown attached to it

So much curry over so many of my books.

I carried The Big Nowhere with my packed lunch and my juice bottle leaked all over it. I had a bit of a tantrum when I got into work and found this sodden block of a book, hurling it spinning across the room in rage. When I went to retrieve it, the light caught the room in such a way to reveal that the blinds, the furniture and all the walls were now totally covered in liquid. I had to do some shamefaced dabbing with a paper towel, but it was still a horrible mess.

There's a happy ending to the story though - the book dried out fine, and it was someone else's office.

lol i had nearly the exact same thing happen except with hummus instead of juice, and at my school locker instead of in an office. plus it was homemade hummus, with way too much garlic. my copy of don quixote still smells strongly of garlic and tahini XD

The first thing I do when opening a book, is go to the last page to check how many pages it is. Yes, I'm pathetic for doing this. But this way I can... pace myself, I know how long the journey is.

I used to be so anal about keeping my books pristine. Now I really don't care. Heck, I like when the spine is cracked: it shows life.

Giving the bookmark thing a go -- using a film ticket.

Some frenzied last-minute packing for a move saw a pocket dictionary stashed into a bag of kitchenware, where some bright green dish-washing liquid spilt all over it and when it dried it went PURPLE (?!). I was mad at myself for a time but it looked pretty awesome.

Had to stop being quite so disappointed in myself when I got book corners tatty, because reading on my commute it was basically inevitable, and anyway massmarket paperbacks are not great rare treasures of the century. Plus the spine always creases even though I never bend them through more than 150 degrees. Damn you, paperback spines! (Still get a little pang of self-disgust though, and have to fight back shivers of horror if I see a fellow commuter deliberately fold spines or corners back)

I work at the library of a supposedly prestigious university and every month there is some student who has to be tracked down for repeated book defacement. Goddamn, you kids are meant to be smart, why you act like animals with the books please

A friend vomited on my copy of "The Neverending Story", and my twelve year old self apparently didn't really mind. That book stayed on my shelf for years afterward, despite the green tint on the edge of the pages.
My copy of Saramago's "Blindess" was clearly made with lolglue, as the whole thing came apart within days of buying it. I ended up taking out all the pages, duct-taping them together and then taping that now-bloated collection to the paperback cover. It's quite handsome and a bit cozy too.

Reading about other people's big, focused reading projects, I often feel greatly tempted to follow suit. Take the lovely weblog Wuthering Expectations for instance. When he does things like read a whole mess of classic yiddish literature, I get quite excited about following suit. But then I don't.
Indeed, I'm often tempted to go for big, singular reading projects, but am too easily distracted into the next enticing thing. I'm quite happy with flitting from author to author; from genre to genre; from country to country with little or no plan beyond "Say, Ozick makes this Trilling fellow sound a (prepare to slap your knees, people!) thrilling read! To the library!")
It's the joy of being, yes, an amateur reader who doesn't have anyone but himself to answer to, I guess.
But still... there's that fine professor by my eardrum whispering commands. Read Knuth's Art of Programming NOW! Why haven't you read all of Hamsun yet -- get to it! I say, you're frightfully ignorant about Schopenhauer, what. LOL let's try Derrida ahaha!

As for handling of books, I suppose my poor books haven't much hope. I don't break the backs of hardcover books, but my paperbacks do have a tendency to look like they've really been through labor to deliver me their contests, with the stretchmarks to prove it. Depends on the book though -- Penguins tend to get them, Dalkey's do not, it seems.
Not much of a note-taker or underliner -- I'm too self-conscious about being a moron. I have in fact written a Nabokovian "Irony!" in one of my volumes of Plato. Just recently, I spent five minutes erasing lines, comments and questions I'd defaced my abridged "Life of Sammy Johnson" with, as I wanted to put it on my family's shared bookshelf.

I hate creasing the spine but it's so inconvenient to have the book determined to close itself when you're trying to take notes, especially typed notes as I often do these days. That's why I'm loving my 'Phenomenology of Spirit', which is so floppy it stays open unattended without the slightest bit of creasing.

As for annotations etc, pencil underlining - ok, anything else - go fuck yourself. Although in library copies it's sometimes nice to have the annotations of someone smart to guide you along. Or the annotations of someone dim to bring the occasional lol to a dry text.

"Say, Ozick makes this Trilling fellow sound a (prepare to slap your knees, people!) thrilling read! To the library!")

i've been a terrible reader lately. so busy with my store and at night i'm either too wired or tired to read. i mostly just read in whatever books i get for the store or what people bring in. a page or two of everything. which just makes me feel scattered. today i dipped into *spirit of '69 - a skinhead bible* and *tahl* which is a massive book-length epic poem published in the 40's and written by a woman named jeremy ingalls.

"The first thing I do when opening a book, is go to the last page to check how many pages it is. "

I always do this. When I read short stories I always note how long each story is. Part of this is habit from university, reading articles and trying to estimate time necessary to finish, but it also helps me look at the structure of what I am reading. I will read a 50pg story differently than a 15pg story, because the author needs to do different things with the length available. Looking at how an author works within 200pgs vs. 550pgs can be very instructive for reading. Also tracking chapter lengths, etc.

I read Star Trek novels from age 11-15, and the standard length of those is 270pg. It is now fixed in my head that 270pg. is the Optimum Length, and anything 280pg or over is a Large Book and anything 260pg or under is a Small Book.

have you ever made a list of books you're going to read and actually stuck to it?

i mean in order, like a queue

no, never that I can recall

I make a pile instead of a list. And then I don't stick to it.

a few years ago I put all the books I intended to read that year on a single shelf & made that my year's reading. doing the same thing this year but I've already jumped ahead in the queue. have decided to throw off my usual strategy by feeling free to be reading 2 books at once which I haven't tried to do since lol college.

i just feel like i have so many books i want to read that i waste time deciding or reading just parts of them. which is no big deal but it's annoying. maybe i could try. would do a pile but the library only lets me get them for 6 weeks, including renewal. my resolution this year is not to be afraid of very long books and i feel like i have to force myself to start them. :-/