The Book Habits Meme (Reboot)

Reading Time

Writtenwyrdd originally posted this in October of last year, but I thought I would bring it back with a few additions. If you have a blog, then post your own answers to the following questions and leave a comment with the link!

Here goes:

Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack:
I don’t, actually. I sort of get involved in my reading, so snacking really isn’t an option.

What is your favorite drink while reading?
Hot chocolate, green tea, or water. But I don’t drink while reading. I stop, get a drink, and then continue reading. I can’t imagine doing both at the same time. That’s the kind of multitasking only crazy people can muster. Imagine that. You’re reading, imagining whatever is going on in your head, reaching out your arm, grabbing a mug, and drinking all at the same time. That’s a lot of stuff going on!

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?
I don’t mark in books I am reading for fun. I do for books I am using for graduate school or research. Generally I don’t like marking, but when you have to remember passages and things, marking is inevitable. That said, I own duplicates of books I really love that I have to mark in. I’m doing just that with Tobias S. Buckell’s books, actually. I recently bought all his first edition hardcovers, signed, just so I’d have a set that I could keep in perfect condition. I’m a weirdo.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?
Bookmark. Rarely will I lay the book flat and open. People who dog-ear their books are communists and shouldn’t be allowed to vote. That’s the kind of blasphemous nonsense the Inquisition wouldn’t have put up with, and that might be the only thing I would agree with them on.

Fiction, nonfiction, or both?
A little of both, actually.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of a chapter, or can you stop anywhere?
I can stop anywhere, but I prefer to stop at the end of a chapter. I hate stopping in the middle of things. At best, I am comfortable with stopping at a break within a chapter, but even that is bothersome.

Are you the type of person to throw a book across the room or on the floor if the author irritates you?
I’ve come close. I’ve slammed books down onto my bed before, but I’ve yet to toss something across the room. To be fair, I don’t own my apartment, so throwing things is a bit dangerous when I don’t want to put holes in my walls.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop and look it up right away?
It depends on the word. If it’s really obscure, I’ll look it up. Otherwise, I use what little I know of the English language to figure out what it means on the spot.

What are you currently reading?
Spellwright by Blake Charlton
Angel Dust Apocalypse by Jeremy Robert Johnson
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin
Servant of a Dark God by John Brown
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

What is the last book you bought?
I think it was every single book by Tobias S. Buckell (first editions and signed). He had a deal going on at his blog and I partook.

Are you the type of person that reads one book at a time, or can you read more than one?
I can read more than one. Sometimes I start something, find it a little dull, and move on to something else for a while. Other times I don’t have much of a choice, being a graduate student and all. I’ve had 10+ different books going at once before.

Do you have a favorite time/place to read?
I prefer to read somewhere not in my house and away from a computer. That’s not an easy thing to do, especially right now with a few of my geckos needing regular care.

On top of that, I either need absolute silence or pure noise. Anything between is a no go.

Do you prefer series books or stand alones?
Stand alones. I like series, but they require you to invest a lot of time into them, and unless a series is really good, I won’t do that. There are few series that I have been obsessed enough with to buy the rest of the books and read them (Harry Potter, Tobias Buckell’s Caribbean SF, and some others). When you find a good series, though, it’s a wonderful experience.

Is there a specific book or author you find yourself recommending over and over?
Four: Tobias S. Buckell, Karen Miller, Kage Baker, and Susan Beth Pfeffer. I’ve recommend loads of others, but those three have probably seen the most airtime from my lips (or fingers, actually).

How do you organize your books?(by genre, title, author’s last name, etc.)
I organize my books by genre and size. Mass markets are all together, with a section for SF/F, general fiction, and non-fiction. All other sizes are much the same. I separate all my books on writing from the rest, though. It makes it easier to get to them.

And now that that is over with, I am going to tag Weirdside and NextRead. Again, if you want to do this on your blog, go for it and come back here to give me the link!

Email
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Digg
Reddit
LinkedIn

18 Responses

  1. I found these really interesting questions, so I posted them and my answers on my blog: travelsthroughiest.blogspot.com.
    Thanks for a fun exercise.

Leave a Reply

Follow Me

Newsletter

Support Me

Recent Posts

A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:

Read More »

Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024

And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:

Read More »

2025: The Year of Something

We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩

Read More »