15 Things About Books
2005-12-14 00:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ckdBooks. Booooooooooooks. If I were a zombie, I wouldn't eat brains. Just books.
1. I don't remember learning how to read. Presumably I did learn at some point. I miss knowing what that "eureka" moment was like for me.
2. I'm a crazed text addict and have been for as long as I can remember (see #1). My parents tried punishing me by not letting me read; my reaction was to read, out loud, whatever text was in sight. Since this was in the car, the proliferation of signs visible from my seat was enough to drive them to distraction, and they relented for the sake of their own sanity.
3. I will, if driven to extremes, read anything. After a bag-snatching incident left me in a hotel room with nothing else to read (having already read the local paper, which was the only printed material available for purchase at that time of night, praise be to newspaper boxes) I read The Marriott Story. All the way through. Next up would have been the Book of Mormon, but I got to sleep before needing it.
4. My standard trip planning level of book packing is "a book a flight and a book a night". With the advent of e-books on my PDA, that's less true for long trips than it used to be, but I will always pack books. As I once put it, "I could be going for a sleepover in a freaking library and getting there by riding in a bookmobile—I'd still pack a book or two."
5. I can read in every form of conveyance I've tried reading in (cars, buses, trains, planes, boats). I have not tried reading while riding an amusement park ride; I wouldn't want to drop the book.
6. I used to read while walking, and never ran into anything (or anyone) while doing so. I don't do that now for reasons having to do with the greater density of Stuff What Can Kill You in a major city, as compared to a small town where the single traffic light was actually outside the town limits.
7. The "mass-market[1]" paperback form factor is my favorite for reasons of portability and safety. Safety as in "not dropping it on your head, or anyone else's head, when reading in bed and falling asleep". This also accounts for requiring paper books to be packed on trips; dropping the PDA over the side of the bed is Not Good.
8. Online fora have found me a lot of good books, not just through recommendations, but through authors being interesting in discussions.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
autopope, joel_rosenberg, lwe, scalzi, skzbrust...this means you, among others.
9. I had to write a college admissions essay on a book that had changed my life, or had a great influence on me, or some such silliness. So I used The Elements of Style. It must have worked, since I got in.
10. I used to enjoy haunting used bookstores from coast to coast, looking for particular out of print books (usually SF/F paperbacks). The whole Internet/eBay/abebooks thing has made that both far less fruitful and far less interesting, since the thrill of the hunt was part of the appeal. Point-click-ship doesn't have the joy of saying "aha!" in a used bookstore in San Jose as I find the last book I need to complete a series. I even kept a used bookstore database in the HP200LX (a PDA, sort of).
11. I may well be the only person who ever checked out Asimov's book on using a slide rule from my high school's library. The school opened in 1981. I very much doubt the book is still there, alas; if I'd had a chance, I would have taken it when they got rid of it. (If it is still there, someone please let me know.)
12. The Cambridge Public Library has a pretty good SF collection, which is no longer in the farthest back shelves of the lowest level of the stacks; they're renovating and expanding the main library, and are in a temporary facility that's closer to my house. (Yay, but I still want them to open the new, bigger library.)
13. I like visiting libraries. Both Seattle and San Antonio have neat new libraries.
14. I prefer the Library of Congress classification scheme to the Dewey Decimal system, but can deal with either. Boston uses LCC as do the university libraries I have access to through work or alumni IDs; Cambridge and most of the rest of the Minuteman network use DDC. I've never used the Cutter system, though the Boston Athenæum apparently uses it for some of their collection.
15. I need to make a books/reading icon.
[1] Yes, I know that the real difference is strippability. Pedant.
1. I don't remember learning how to read. Presumably I did learn at some point. I miss knowing what that "eureka" moment was like for me.
2. I'm a crazed text addict and have been for as long as I can remember (see #1). My parents tried punishing me by not letting me read; my reaction was to read, out loud, whatever text was in sight. Since this was in the car, the proliferation of signs visible from my seat was enough to drive them to distraction, and they relented for the sake of their own sanity.
3. I will, if driven to extremes, read anything. After a bag-snatching incident left me in a hotel room with nothing else to read (having already read the local paper, which was the only printed material available for purchase at that time of night, praise be to newspaper boxes) I read The Marriott Story. All the way through. Next up would have been the Book of Mormon, but I got to sleep before needing it.
4. My standard trip planning level of book packing is "a book a flight and a book a night". With the advent of e-books on my PDA, that's less true for long trips than it used to be, but I will always pack books. As I once put it, "I could be going for a sleepover in a freaking library and getting there by riding in a bookmobile—I'd still pack a book or two."
5. I can read in every form of conveyance I've tried reading in (cars, buses, trains, planes, boats). I have not tried reading while riding an amusement park ride; I wouldn't want to drop the book.
6. I used to read while walking, and never ran into anything (or anyone) while doing so. I don't do that now for reasons having to do with the greater density of Stuff What Can Kill You in a major city, as compared to a small town where the single traffic light was actually outside the town limits.
7. The "mass-market[1]" paperback form factor is my favorite for reasons of portability and safety. Safety as in "not dropping it on your head, or anyone else's head, when reading in bed and falling asleep". This also accounts for requiring paper books to be packed on trips; dropping the PDA over the side of the bed is Not Good.
8. Online fora have found me a lot of good books, not just through recommendations, but through authors being interesting in discussions.
autopope, joel_rosenberg, lwe, scalzi, skzbrust...this means you, among others.9. I had to write a college admissions essay on a book that had changed my life, or had a great influence on me, or some such silliness. So I used The Elements of Style. It must have worked, since I got in.
10. I used to enjoy haunting used bookstores from coast to coast, looking for particular out of print books (usually SF/F paperbacks). The whole Internet/eBay/abebooks thing has made that both far less fruitful and far less interesting, since the thrill of the hunt was part of the appeal. Point-click-ship doesn't have the joy of saying "aha!" in a used bookstore in San Jose as I find the last book I need to complete a series. I even kept a used bookstore database in the HP200LX (a PDA, sort of).
11. I may well be the only person who ever checked out Asimov's book on using a slide rule from my high school's library. The school opened in 1981. I very much doubt the book is still there, alas; if I'd had a chance, I would have taken it when they got rid of it. (If it is still there, someone please let me know.)
12. The Cambridge Public Library has a pretty good SF collection, which is no longer in the farthest back shelves of the lowest level of the stacks; they're renovating and expanding the main library, and are in a temporary facility that's closer to my house. (Yay, but I still want them to open the new, bigger library.)
13. I like visiting libraries. Both Seattle and San Antonio have neat new libraries.
14. I prefer the Library of Congress classification scheme to the Dewey Decimal system, but can deal with either. Boston uses LCC as do the university libraries I have access to through work or alumni IDs; Cambridge and most of the rest of the Minuteman network use DDC. I've never used the Cutter system, though the Boston Athenæum apparently uses it for some of their collection.
15. I need to make a books/reading icon.
[1] Yes, I know that the real difference is strippability. Pedant.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-14 05:30 (UTC)K.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-14 06:07 (UTC)Me neither. As far as I know, I have *always* known how to read. My mom thought I learned when I was three; at least that's when she noticed. (She had tucked my sister and me around her on the sofa to read us the "funnies" from the Sunday paper -- this was probably the old Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph -- and I started reading them to her. I do not remember this incident, myself, but that's the way she remembered my learning to read. "I never taught you," she insisted.)
I have a book on slide rule use that I, um, appropriated for myself when the library was weeding the math section a few years back. Alas, it's not the Asimov. I actually do still have my slide rule from high-school around somewhere, but I forget just where now. I tried to use it a few years ago, and remembered how to do multiplication (and, by extension, division) but not much else.
Most very large libraries use the Library of Congress Classification because it allows you to get much more specific within fewer characters of "call number" space. (Dewey can be *very, very* specific but this often requires drawing the call number out way beyond what will fit the width of the book spine.) Most smaller (K-12, many small colleges, and all but very large public) libraries use Dewey because it's easier, also because it was in use first (invented 1876. Librarians can be very conservative about such things because it's a pain in the you-know-where to make huge changes in how your collection is cataloged).
Cutter is one of a handful of "other" classifications that were developed but never quite caught on because the big two took hold on the cataloging world. (This happened early in the 1900s.) But "Cuttering" (often spelled with a small "c") lives on, and is still a part of most LC and Dewey call numbers; it's the term for the initial-and-number or letters that stand for the author's name (or the first word in the title) that is the last part of the call number, enabling shelvers to get books in order by the name/1st word within each subject classification.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-14 11:32 (UTC)More importantly (to me!) is that you not drop the PDA or hard back book on your wife (that would be me). The floor over the side of the bed will not complain if you hit it with a heavy object, while I, on the other hand, will (presumably I'm awake enough to do so).
You also neglected to mention how addiction to reading material is genetic in your family, from your father and his incessant need to have at least five hundred newspapers (per day!) to your grandmother who started you on the "book a flight" rule. I remember her saying that during the hijacking craze in the 70s and 80s she would pack an extra book in her carryon so she wouldn't get bored just in case the plane was hijacked.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2005-12-14 12:45 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-14 14:29 (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2005-12-14 22:33 (UTC)i am occasionally disconcerted to find people who don't have books in their homes. (you know, the kind of people who use bookshelves to hold pictures and knicknacks...). if i leave the house without at least one book AND my "paper" journal i feel like i have forgotten something....(like my pants)