TOP TEN TUESDAY | BOOKISH BRAGS OR CONFESSIONS

I’m not finding this week’s prompt very easy, partly because I don’t really think about bragging about anything to do with my reading, and likewise I don’t really feel shame about anything I read or don’t either. If I like a book that’s a “guilty pleasure,” I’m happy to openly praise it. If I dislike a book everyone loves, I’m find with being the odd one out. So this seems like a slightly odd one for me. I’m going to change it up just a tad to include things I’m grateful for in with the “brags” section, because that is something I can hopefully find more of!

Brags/Gratitude

1. I am still proud of reading Ducks, Newburyport! I ended up loving it, so it’s not like it was a horrible slog – but it was very, very long!
2. Not so much a brag as a gratitude. I read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl when I was about eleven or so. It had a very deep impact on me. I was lucky enough to visit the house she hid in when I was older, and that was also a major experience that has stuck with me.
3. Okay, so this is dredging back into the dark days of history, but when I was seven I read my first chapter book. It was A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done – learning to read fluently is something I think we probably all remember as having been slow and a bit painful! But reading a classic with more complex language was an extra challenge. I’m glad I stuck with it though, because by the time I finally got to the end, not only had I found a favourite story, but I was able to read much more easily.
4. When I was a kid my parents would take me to a small used bookstore in gastown in Vancouver called Colophon Books (I think that’s how it was spelled, but it’s been over three decades, so…). It’s been gone for decades (sadly), but it was my favourite place. Not only because it was full of room after room of wonderful books to explore, but because the owner was someone who believed in encouraging young people to read. He had a dollar table, and I’d save my allowance for weeks to go and spend a very long time combing through and painstakingly choosing a stack of books. Every time I went to pay, though, I’d magically have money left over and be able to get another book or two. He did this for me every time I went, and the joy of being able to grab one of the books I’d struggled to put back on the shelf and take it home is something I still remember!
5. I’m both proud and grateful for this blog. it’s something I enjoy, so it doesn’t feel like it’s a ton of work – but if I’m being honest, it is. I’m proud that I’ve stuck with this for longer than most things in my life, and that I’m still finding it so rewarding. I’m also incredibly grateful for the online book blogging community, because I’ve found some wonderful fellow bookworms here!

Confessions

1. I have still only read one and a half books by Dickens. I keep meaning to try again, but I am worried that the fact that he drew out his stories because he was paid by length will make them unbearably slow. I don’t do well with slow!
2. I haven’t read (and probably never will read) 1984 by George Orwell. I know it’s a classic and has a lot of important cultural touchstones in it. But I kind of feel like we’re living parts of what I know about it, and I also don’t really want to immerse myself in a world that’s potentially even more stressful and depressing than this one. I feel like we have enough to deal with!
3. I’m putting this here because I’m running out of ideas, but I don’t really feel like it’s something that needs to be confessed, exactly. It’s just something some people do and others don’t. But I have taken to sometimes marking favourite passages in books I read. Sometimes it’s using those sticky page marker things, but other times I’ll get a pencil and underline or write something in the margin. I don’t do this with every book I read. But the ones that have really given me something I connected to I often do want to mark. Partly so that I can find the passages I loved later for posts about favourite quotes. Partly so that when I re-read the book in the future, I can see whether the same passages stand out and whether my impressions have changed. But also so that I can leave behind some of my thoughts on a book for others to discover when I’m gone. I don’t know if my kid will end up being an adult reader, but if that is the case, I like the idea of leaving my thoughts between the pages to be found later.

That’s all I can think of for this week. Not quite ten, but that’s all I’ve got!

What about you guys? Did you have ten this week? Are there any things you’re particularly proud of in your reading life? Anything you sheepishly want to convfess?

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly link-up feature created by The Broke and the Bookish and hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every week TTT has a different topic, and everyone who links up has to create a link of ten items that fit that topic. To see past and upcoming topics, go here.