Weekly Geeks: Genre Allergies

Given the prompt by Weekly Geeks this week to discuss my genre dislikes and allergies (or, more positively, my genre loves and recommendation), I decided this was a post in need of a list. Because if there is one genre I really love, it’s a good list.

Three Genres I Dislike/Am Allergic To:
1. Boy-fantasy (see: A Game of Thrones and possibly Eragon, if you asked my co-blogger Kate)
2. Stream-of-consciousness anything (which I guess means the Beats are out as a whole)
3. Poetry (unless it’s Tennyson or “Jabberwocky”)

Weekly Geeks: A Favorite Authors ABC

Weekly Geeks this week asks us to make a list of our favorite authors, one for each letter of the alphabet (or some variation thereon). Still quite difficult! Because it could just get excessive I limited myself to two authors at most for each letter. :)

A: Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott
B: Nicholas Basbanes and Julian Barnes
C: Susanna Clarke and Wilkie Collins
D: Alexandre Dumas and Arthur Conan Doyle

National Bookshelf Sharing Day!

I took to Weekly Geeks this week in hopes of creating a National Bookshelf Sharing Week. In belated honor of the apparently-real National Carpenter’s day, we’re all sharing our favorite piece of bookish carpentry: the bookshelf.

Here is my little expat shelf:

Believe it or not, I only brought six of them with me from the States and the rest are all evidence of me failing at an attempt to limit how many books I buy.

I can’t wait to see all your shelves and a very happy belated Carpenter’s Day!

–Corey

Hey, all! Kate here, popping in to give you a glimpse of my bookshelf (after the cut): 

Weekly Geeks: Books and Movies

For Weekly Geeks this week, we have been asked to turn out minds towards books and their film versions. I think this is such a broad and hot-button issue for me (and one that we’ve touched on here at LT in the past), that I’m going to save my more general gripes and praise in favor of focusing more particularly on Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

I have a long history with Neverwhere despite the fact that, until last week, I had never read it. Not only was it one of those books that everyone and their mother said I should read and that I would love, the miniseries version of it was one of my college roommate’s favorite things. She alone championed that production and, as much as everyone else urged me to read the book, she highly recommended the miniseries version. Be that as it may, I acted neither on her recommendation nor anyone else’s. The book remained unread and the miniseries unwatched.

Weekly Geeks: Ten Things about Books and Me

Weekly Geeks this week asked us to list ten things about yourself in relation to books. They then exhorted us to let our imaginations run wild. Lists, imagination, and books? Count me in!

1. It literally pains me to turn down the corner of pages. Therefore, I’m never without a bookmark, book dart, or odd piece of paper to use to mark my place.

2. My favorite kind of book is a second-hand one with an inscription in the front. They’re like little windows into someone else’s life (and mysteries unto themselves since you then wonder how they ended up in the secondhand store).

3. My book weight is possibly the best thing I bought in all of my three years at college.

Weekly Geeks: Awards and Lists

Write a post discussing why awards matter, or don’t matter. Are you influenced by awards and best lists? Do you seek out award winners? Or avoid them? Do you think award-winning books should be timeless? That they should always stay in print? Do you think time is a better judge of quality than an award committee?

The short answer: Awards are a great starting point.

Weekly Geeks: A Reader’s Self Portrait

Firstly, sorry for the unexplained, prolonged absence of both Kate and I here on Literary Transgressions. Unsurprisingly, the holidays took over and I had a flu-like bout of jetlag. So my apologies, readers!

Weekly Geeks this week asks us to show where we like to read and what we’re reading now. Since my camera is missing (eek), I give you the following from my computer’s webcam:

Weekly Geeks: The Extra Hour

How you find that “extra hour” to read on a normal day? Do you read for a few minutes here and there? Do you put aside certain nights or times of the day to read?

To be honest, I rarely have an extra five minutes these days, let alone a full hour. What used to seem like a given right now seems like an unimaginable luxury — a whole hour a day to read! To do nothing but run my eyes along a page full of words and get lost in a story!

I read in snippets now.

Weekly Geeks: Where Did That Extra Hour Go?

How do you find that ‘extra hour’ to read on a normal day? Do you read for a few minutes here and there? Do you put aside certain nights or times of the day to read? How do you minimize family interruptions?

Back in the pre-graduate school real world, I have to say that my commute was a life-saver in providing that ‘extra hour.’ On average, I had at least an hour a day spent on public transit where I could just whip out a book and disappear into it. Add to that, I had an undisturbed lunch hour most days with just me, some PB&J, and my book. It was a great and I did get to read a lot of books that way. However, to be honest, since I started graduate school, I’ve lost my ‘extra hour’ and have been having trouble reading things I want.

Weekly Geeks: O.C.R.

I have to say, I love it when Weekly Geeks coins a phrase. This week, it’s the O.C.R., or the Overly Critical Reader. Such readers over-analyse every aspect of a book, refuse to like characters unless they “prove” themselves, and repeatedly roll their eyes while reading.

Some of these symptoms, I’ll admit, sounded familiar. Turns out that I can be a bit of an O.C.R. — shocker, right?