15 Things About Me and Books (Meme)

[A meme with my name on it, clearly.  Via John Scalzi.]

1.  As a toddler, I was obsessed with books as objects.  I especially enjoyed yanking my father's books off the shelves, piling them on the floor, and then sitting in the middle.  Eventually, my parents took evasive action and bought me my own bookcase--thereby giving me the opportunity of yanking my own books off the shelves, piling them on the floor, and then sitting in the middle.

2.  My first favorite book was Dorothy Kunhardt's Pat the Bunny (1940).  My parents discovered that I would sit quietly in restaurants if they gave me Pat the Bunny to read; they also discovered that the sight of an infant in a high chair, happily reading a book, was good for a lot of double-takes from other customers. 

3.  My mother promised me that she would teach me how to read when I turned five.  On my fifth birthday, she took out the readers--only to find that I already knew how to read, thanks to Sesame Street.  (When I enrolled in elementary school, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Edie, was quite exasperated when she discovered that I had already gone through all the textbooks.  I was eventually packed off to the third-grade classroom for my reading lessons.) 

4.  The first adult book I ever read was, apparently, The Maltese Falcon.  Or so my parents tell me.  Since I was five years old at the time, I fear that I failed to grasp the novel's finer points.

5.  The first adult book I can remember reading is Shogun.  I was ten years old, and it took me a week to get through it.   

6.  My introduction to nineteenth-century fiction came courtesy of a cousin, who gave me a three-vols.-in-one copy of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Good Wives, and Little Men.  I estimate that I read and reread this book nearly fifty times between the ages of six and ten, finally reducing it to shreds.  (As I recall, I later did a similar number on the What Katy Did books.)  After my Ph.D. exams, my parents gave me a new copy. 

7.  I feel terribly ashamed whenever I fail to finish a novel; it just seems wrong, somehow, to abandon the author's work, no matter how sublimely dreadful the prose.   By contrast, I feel no compunction when I abandon similarly unappetizing works of scholarship--even though, as a scholar, I ought to feel some faint twinges of sympathy for the writer. 

8.  Until my senior year in college, I entertained a rather cordial dislike for Dickens.  Like so many other people, I simply couldn't get past the grotesques.  But then I spent a couple of days reading Bleak House, and was absolutely staggered by it--a kind of conversion experience, if you will. 

9.  We were asked to read Pynchon's Vineland in an undergraduate seminar on postmodernism, and all of us loathed it.  Absolutely loathed it.   Now, when I teach something I love (like Bleak House...), I sometimes flash back to our professor's evident dismay at the gap between his experience of the text and ours.  I always feel like I should be protecting the novel, somehow, even though Dickens and Eliot can really take care of themselves. 

10.  I estimate that I purchase nearly 90% of my books second-hand, with roughly the same percentage being from online booksellers. 

11.  When I moved to Chicago in 1992, I had about 200 books.  When I left Chicago in 1998, I had about 3000 books.  As of right now, I have 5,703 books.  This is a somewhat ominous progression.

12.  One of my "gifts" to myself for finishing my degree was a copy of the Rolliad, in honor of the time I spent amusing myself in rare book rooms with satirical attacks on William Pitt the Younger.  (In case you're wondering, this was a useful antidote to Victorian sentimental biographies devoted to virtuous women.) 

13.  The largest book I've ever used was an elephant folio of broadsides; it was approximately three feet long and weighed almost as much as I did.  Just turning the pages was something of an adventure.

14.  For some reason, I can rarely get any reading done in my campus office; I much prefer to read in one of the local coffeeshops.  At home, I usually read in bed (cats optional).   

15.  I never got around to reading the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys series, but wolfed down all of Walter Farley's Black Stallion novels.