Book Confessions

This week the Broke and the Bookish are asking for bookish confessions. I think I already confessed to some of my more egregious book-related actions, like ruining my middle-school library's copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls by spilling milk on it -- but I managed to think up five more.


1. For a long while, I wouldn't go near the Left Behind series, because as a kid raised to believed the Rapture was real and inevitable, the thought of actually being left behind terrified me. I'm not exaggerating when I say I didn't go a week in my first twenty years of life without being reminded that the world was doomed to become the province of a psychopath, and my only hope of escaping that fate (to be followed by an eternity in Hell) was church.  After escaping from such beliefs, I later read the first book out of curiosity and found it hilariously awful -- so much so that I read the entire sixteen book series in the month and  a half that followed.

2. Although I'm hostile toward digital readers, I'll probably wind up buying one within the next five years. My rising Luddite tendecies notwithstanding, my job as a reference assistant often entails helping people with computers, and increasingly their own wireless devices. If touch-screen interfaces are the way of the future, I need to learn to navigate them to function out in the world. Of course, at home I can be as tech-free as I want.

3. Like other readers, I tend to avoid "hot" series on the prinicple that they're just too popular. This is snobbish, of course,  but I don't feel bad about it. I just don't myself too seriously on this point, especially since the one time I succumbed to peer pressure and tried a series everyone was nuts about, I found I loved it. I speak, of course, of Harry Potter, which I now re-read once a year.

4. When visiting someone's home, I tend to look for and then investigate their bookcases. Nothing else (aside from a garden, I suppose) would attact my attention.

5.  Although most of the books of my childhood are gone, there are a couple of series from middle school that I absolutely will not give up -- California Diaries and Roswell High. I keep them in the same cabinet as my old journals.

6. Once, in my sophomore year of high school, I found a library book that I'd previously lost...on the day that I'd intended to pay for its replacement cost. I decided to pay for the replacement and keep the book, because I loved that book. It was Albert Marrin's The Airman's War, and I keep it in the bookcase near my bed.