sarah eve kelly

Well, I’ve been tagged. This is one of those exercises that I always think I’m going to do so well at, and always end up coming out the ass end of.

Number of Books That I Own:

My safest guess is 500, in my house - the bookcases in my living room, study and bedroom, and a few dozen lying in uncomfortable stacks on the floor. It used to be more. There are probably about 200 in my storage closet. (Mike and I rely on surplus assets sales for bookcases, but now we don’t have a lot of floor left. We could get rid of the Man Chair, which takes up about a third of the living room, but we love it too much.) In the explosion that was my parents selling their house, I lost more, a lot more; and prior to travelling in Europe, I had to get rid of a lot.

Here’s the thing: I’m not a great reader. My ADD doesn’t serve my craft very well. I’m always reading, because my eyes want something to do (in the bathroom; walking from place to place; during commercials - reading fills all the incidental holes in my life). I tend to read the same books over and over (see below). I love books as technology, and the books I read mean a lot to me. As a child I swallowed books whole, by the dozen; now I know what I like. I read history books; the novels I start and finish are happy accidents; I own three good dictionaries.

Books that mean a lot to me:

The World According to Garp by John Irving;
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King;
Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie;
Elizabeth I: A Study in Power and Intellect by Paul Johnson;
Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry;
The Barrytown Trilogy by Roddy Doyle;
All the Jeeves stories by P.G. Wodehouse

The list is longer than that, but not by much. I like a lot of books; some I love; very few “mean a lot” to me; I’ve decided to take that qualifier seriously.

Books I have read recently:

The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn by Eric Ives;
The Jeeves Omnibus 3 by P.G. Wodehouse;
Royal Palaces of Tudor England by Simon Thurley;
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey;
Henry VIII and His Queens by David Loades;
Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England’s Tragic Queen by Joanna Denny (pfeh);
Auschwitz by Laurence Rees;
An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

Books I am currently reading:

Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart by John Guy;

I genuinely can’t think of another one, even though I know there must be some; I’ve just gotten up from a nap. That’s a book I bought just today, so it jumps to the front of the mind.

Books in the queue:

A Certain Chemistry by Mil Millington;
… and whatever my supervisor assigns me on Friday - something tells me that my book list is going to cease being my own very, very soon. It’s all very exciting.

Another thing: I gobble up historical fiction like Pringles. It’s not because I like it (sometimes I do); I want to get a feel for how I stand up next to it. Which, of course, is impossible. But while I’m very moved by Patricia Finney, she is the exception rather than the rule, and I find most historical novels to be garbage even if I genuinely enjoy them (this realization is a big motivator of my recent plague of angst). I’m all for anachronism and inaccuracy in its proper time (heh) and proper place, but things like “Elizabeth nervously chewed her nails, a habit she couldn’t kick” drive me spare, because they’re inaccurate and unnecessary (Elizabeth was very vain about her hands, and probably wouldn’t have bitten her nails). So the things that irritate me are the things that I watch for in my own work.

Anyhow, this was probably more than Janet bargained for. I’m not going to tag anyone at the moment, because I’ve seen this post a number of times and I rather suspect I’m near the back of the train for this fad.

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