I’ve been tagged by Beth Overmeyer to participate in the Bookworm Tag challenge.
How is your bookshelf organized? By color, author, genre, size, etc.?
Non-fiction is organized by subject and then by size within subject. Fiction is alphabetical by genre, then author’s last name, and then chronologically if I own more than one book by the same author.
What’s the last MG book you read and did you like it?
Daughter of the Deep by Rick Riordan and I did like it. It’s a fun modernization/continuation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and I really like the sibling dynamics, it’s approach to tackling nuanced topics like betrayal, and its frank discussion of the main character’s menstruation.
Pirates or street thieves (or both)?
I’m a big Patrick O’Brian fan, so any sort of seafaring is right up my alley. Thievery I have less sympathy for. I grew up in poverty but integrity was always reinforced in my morality.
What’s one of the most fictional things you’ve ever done (went skydiving, played a character at a Renaissance faire, set fire to something, tamed a dragon, had high tea with the queen)?
I make historical costumes and attended costumed events. For one event, I wrote letters for the mail packet being delivered to sailing ship re-enactors with a quill and ink. With my handwriting skills, I’m sure the re-enactor who received my letter struggled to even read it! It was a mess!
Bookmarks! Do you use them? Do you memorize the page number? Do you have ticket stubs and old receipts you use instead? Or do you swallow a book whole in one sitting so nothing’s left to mark?
I use paper bookmarks in my planner and will use a receipt or post it note in my fiction books. The library return slip is always handy to use to mark my place in borrowed books. I also put bookmarks in audiobooks when I want to “highlight” a phrase I like, but I don’t use them to mark my place as playback just resumes from the last point.
The Mysterious Thrift Shop: What’s the weirdest/creepiest place you bought a book, and what was it? The better the find and the weirder the shop, the better.
I once bought a deck of tarot cards (with an instructional booklet) form a Wiccan gift shop in Salem, Massachusetts on a full moon Halloween. That night, the bedframe in my house in South Boston kept rocking like someone was pushing it rhythmically. It had never happened before and it never happened again after that. It was an unusually windy night and I later found out that the door in the closet that led to attic storage had been blown open, so … maybe it was “just the wind” after all, but it didn’t feel like it at the time.
What fictional world would you want to vacation in?
I just want the future that Star Trek has envisioned for us. It would be nice to chill in The Shire, too, though.
Do your librarians know you by name?
The children’s librarian knows me and my son. And the librarian who runs our library’s Makerspace knows me. He trained me on how to use the Glowforge and helped me fight with the Cricut machine a few times. I LOVE having a Makerspace at the library where you can use 3D printers, borrow a sewing machine, or a large format printer, laminator, and plotter cutter for occasional DIY projects. We have some people in the community who have started their own small businesses making and selling things that they produce solely at the library!
Hardcover, paperback, eBook, or audiobook, and why?
All of the above. I mostly consume audiobooks, but will pick up a paperback for a deeper study of a text so I don’t feel guilty about marking in the margins. I also buy collector’s edition hardbacks of my favorite books just to put on a “brag shelf” (as my husband calls it). They’re solely there to look at and I own paperback or ebooks of all of them that I actually read.
What’s one of the first books you ever read/the book that made you fall in love with reading (and the story behind it)?
I picked up Black Beauty when I was just a bit too young to really understand it all, but the challenge of piecing together the context of a world without electricity or motorized transportation was fascinating. I liked imaging that conveyances had feelings, too! I devoured it over a weekend trip to a motorcycle rally that my mom dragged me to. We would camp in our conversion van and the kids would hang out at camp while the adults rode during the day. I remember there was a dance in a pavilion at the camp site that night and there was dancing and a campfire. It was COLD, and there was a bright full moon, so I walked around a field and the woods behind the pavilion where the adults were drinking and dancing (and probably doing a lot of drugs). All day long I’d just read, and read, and read, and I’d finally come up for air when the sun went down. I can’t remember how old I was, but probably about 8 or 9. I think it was before I broke my arm in 3rd grade, and before we read A Wrinkle in Time as a class.
