Dog Ears

I have a confession to make.


I dog-ear books.

YES I SAID IT, DOG-EAR.


As a quick, dirty, and highly accurate poll, I asked one of my fellow library student friends if she ever dog-eared her books, and if so, which ones? She was horrified at the thought. Unless perhaps it was a very old and already beat-up book (not "antique" old and beat-up, mind you -- just the kind of old and beat-up that happens when a 6th grader takes The Lost World along on a field trip, and it gets kicked down the aisle of a school bus on accident).

Personally, I adore both well-loved books, and pristine and well-cared-for books. I love them both at the same time. I can never decide which I like best. This aesthetic carries over into pretty much everything else. How can you love French Minimalist and Shabby Chic at the same time? Let me tell you, it makes interior decorating both delightful and hellish. I tried to make a scrapbook once, and it just got really mangled and sort of schizophrenic in content.

At any rate.

Trade paperbacks, I dog-ear. Except my Laurie R. King books. I think. I may have dog-eared some of them, but they are all on loan now to my non-dog-earing friend so I cannot check. I intend to dog-ear my sociology books that I was talking about a few posts ago, but was having doubts. You see, they are in fairly pristine condition. And yet, they are just trade paperbacks, there is nothing particularly special about them. I wonder if psychologically, I might read them more readily if I got past the fear of damaging them.

It's mostly psychology, I think. My (trade paperback) copy of Shantaram, I will not dog-ear. I read it readily enough, and also, it was a gift. I'll never dog-ear a hardcover. Or a comic book, because you need to read all the way to the corners. I probably won't dog-ear anything that was first published before 1930, unless
a. I hate it (looking at you, Great Gatsby)
b. It's one of my multiple copies I have bought specifically for the purpose of having a "pocket" copy (most notably, Pride and Prejudice).

But I also have some trades that I bought, that are just... too nice right now to dog-ear. They haven't been dropped on the floor often enough, I guess.

Going to book hell?

Or librarian hell?

Things I Love Thursday: Dirt, Dirt, Dirt

Did you miss the Love Pig?

Happy Thursday! Are you feeling the love?

I love...

♥ Getting my garden planted, and watching all the little onions and cucumber and bean sprouts poke their way to the surface. It's magical!

♥ Trader Joe's Maple Leaf Cookies. Sugar rush! I can only eat one or two at a time.

♥ Birthday dinners

♥ A smile by someone who is truly surprised and pleased

♥ New books (duh!)

♥ Having goals

♥ Getting an amazing present from a friend

♥ Delicious leftovers in the fridge

♥ People who cook for me

♥ Happy cats

What do you love this week?

Comics!

Lately I've been taking advantage of this Amazon Prime thing by ordering up anything that catches my eye. After all, I am paying for that free shipping. And I am buying things that I otherwise might not spend my money on, because of purchasing this year of free shipping... Oh... well, look, it's books, and will I ever regret a book?

Definitely not.

That's not entirely true, I have purchased one terrible book. I'm usually very careful about books, purchasing only things I have already read, or by authors I trust, or based on previews and reviews that entice me and are reliable. I am very critical in this, and so far, the only time I wasted my money was in purchasing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which I gave away for free in disgust. It was an amusing idea, poorly executed.

Anyway, since then, I have been even more strict in my book purchases. Libraries exist, use them as previews. Listen to your friends when they tell you a series starts to suck. Spend a few minutes reading in the bookstore.

[I must confess I took a short break writing this entry, and purchased two more books just now]

I have regretted a few comics that I bought, but those don't count as much... I think taste in comics changes more quickly for me. Some things I bought in high school are just too foolish for me now. And yet, some of the books I read in elementary school are still totally gold (the Redwall series, Betsy-Tacy and Tib, and several more that could make for their own post).

At any rate...

 Lately I'm buying a lot of comics!

No shot of my face because I'm not wearing makeup, and while I'm not usually vain, it's just not working today

Jess Fink wrote We Can Fix It a while ago, about having a rad jumpsuit and a sweet time machine, and going back to try and fix all the embarrassing and sexually awkward and painful things in her past. It was quite funny, but took a dark turn very suddenly that I wasn't expecting, right before the good ending.

I love you, Jess Fink. You are one of my biggest sexy and funny heroes. You nail it every time. Check out Kid With Experience, her sketch and daily-life update comics.

On Tumblr, I follow a lot of people who like comics, despite the fact that... I'm not that into comics. Comics like Batman and Red Sonja and whatever else is popular right now... for some reason it just doesn't grab me the same way?

This makes only the second "classic" sized comic to hit my shelves.  V For Vendetta is the other one. 

At any rate, someone posted some panels from Rat Queens, which is about crude and sassy ladies (a dwarf, an elf, an ex cult member, and a smidge... whatever that is, who go on quests and get drunk and beat people up and are funny and badass)

Despite feeling hesitant, I ordered the first volume. I liked it quite a lot. It was just as... well, crude and sassy and pleasing as one might expect.

[My new books are only 2 days away from me!]

Not going to lie: I'm quite pleased with my purchases above, and one of the books en route to me is another comic book (eeeeee!!!) but comics are still sort of weird for me. I mean, they take but a brief time to read, and yet I tend to avoid comics that have just walls and walls of text right off the bat, and people whinging on for ages about backstory so that you can understand the world the author has built. SNOOZE. Show me, don't tell me! If you make it too complicated, it won't work.

Is that asking for too much? The balance between fast and tedious?

V For Vendetta walks the line very well, I think, with big chunks of text-less art that provides lots of exposition and action. It fits with V's character to be a loquacious ninja. There are walls of text in V, but they are timed well, and fit with the characters who deliver them.

Maybe I'm demanding too much, but I don't care... I curate this library!



[Adding a comics tag to the cloud now]

On People

Why do I bend my fingers back at the knuckles like that? So weird.

So I was reminded this morning that I never (hyperbolically) blog anymore, which is true, although in my defense, sooooo much of the stuff I want to talk about in my brain is stuff that I simply cannot post or write about publicly, which is why stuff like friends-locked LiveJournal has not gone into the graveyard of the internet quite yet. 

Also, every time I try to type "LiveJournal", my fingers write "LiverJournal", and it makes me laugh. Sometimes I think my fingers are dyslexic. It's been getting worse over the years, but that's another post for another day...

Today is about a new book I got from the Staff Suggestions shelf. If you're not checking out the staff suggestions shelf at your library, I don't know what to tell you, apart from start doing it. Seriously. You don't know what you're missing, and the reason you don't know is because you're not looking in the right places. They're right there. Right in front of you. Start looking.

This book is called Drink by Ann Dowsett Johnston. I haven't started reading it yet, but according to the dust jacket, it's about the closing gender gap in alcoholism. Actually, the jacket starts off by describing how feminism and women's rights have moved women forward in positive ways, and then says "but also they started boozing it up like crazy". Dust jackets aren't always accurate, so I'm hoping the book isn't trying to imply that putting more power and equality into women's lives drives them to drink. But, as I said, I haven't read it yet, and this isn't the point of this blog entry anyway.

I noticed a pattern lately in my non-fiction reading. I care about reading about people, and why people do the things they do. People are so, so weird and fascinating to me. Eleanor Roosevelt said 

Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people

 Alright, fine. I understand what she's saying, but I think you can't take it so simply. I like the ideas behind people. The why and how of people. My ideas aren't great ideas and I'll probably just be an armchair philosopher my whole life, but it's fascinating to me.

When I was in high school, for summer reading we got to pick from a list and I didn't know any of the books and didn't know what to do. My dad took the list and went to the bookstore for me. He came back with Catch 22 (definitely one of the best books I've ever read), In Cold Blood (real great book for an impressionable, imaginative child living in the countryside. THANKS), and these two: Games People Play by Eric Berne, and The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman. These were not on the list, but I think he saw them and thought I should have them.

I read them both, or at least, I started reading them. It was a little bit above me in terms of language and academics, but I recall being very impressed by the ideas I found there. High school is like this big, unwinnable game, after all, and it was comforting to know that we were all just playing weird games with each other without even realizing it or understanding what we were doing.

These two got put into the stack of "To Read" today. My mind is grown-up now, and can really dig in.