10 things to warm a bookworm’s heart

It’s a gray, rainy day here in D.C., and though that reminds me of my hometown (Seattle!), it also feels dreary after a few beautiful spring days last week.  When I feel my mood plummeting, I try to think of good things, favorite things (like Julie Andrews sang about in The Sound of Music!)(yes, I’m a Pollyanna)(sometimes)(and I'm okay with that).  I missed the official Top Ten Tuesday for this topic, but I thought my list was worth sharing anyway.  So, here are the top 10 things that warm my bookworm heart, created with help from my sister Virginia and friend Melissa.

1. Sunny spot in a coffee shop

2. Gift cards to book stores

3. Book-themed t-shirts, socks, coasters, etc.

4. Seeing strangers reading a book I love “out in the wild”

5. Book club (and book club friends)

6. Library hold shelf – if you don’t feel like browsing or interacting with anyone, you can still borrow books!

7. New book smell

8. A whole day set aside for reading

9. Favorite reading spot on the couch or in bed, with mandatory fuzzy blanket

10. Hot Dudes Reading Instagram account… self-explanatory

What are some things that warm your book-loving heart?

a girl of the limberlost

Alyce at At Home with Books has started a weekly tradition of revisiting past reading favorites and bringing them into the spotlight. This was just the excuse I needed (but really, when do I ever need an excuse?) to gush about the book my mother would identify as my “ultimate, all-time favorite.” A Girl of the Limberlost was first published in 1909 (Happy Centennial Birthday, book!), and though it tells the story of a turn-of-the-last-century farm girl, it contains enduring themes that ensure its relevancy and classic status in children’s literature.

How did it come to be my favorite? My family didn’t know quite what to do with me as a child. I went through books too fast for it to be worth buying them, I begged my mother daily to read aloud, and I was forever asking to go to the library (I couldn’t get enough books there to satisfy my reading habit either…much like today!). Around 1991-92 my harried mother took me into the local Barnes & Noble and asked the saleslady for “something classic.” I picked the biggest (and prettiest) book presented. Lucky me, that just happened to be A Girl of the Limberlost. Mom read it aloud to my sister and I that first time, but afterwards I would faithfully read Stratton Porter’s novel to myself several times a year. I still have the same paperback copy (see photos!) and I’m fairly sure it’s a miracle that the thing even exists, with the use it’s gotten.

I adore it even now, but I no longer use it as my comfort read, and other books have joined my ‘favorites’ list. It definitely has the power to make me smile and cry and remember being a bookworm of a little girl, entranced equally by the power of words and the joy of nature.

Read it for yourself online (free!) here and here.

Elnora Comstock’s first day at high school is a disaster. The other students laugh at her clothes, and then—to make matters worse—she learns she has to pay for her books and tuition. But her mother has never been able to show Elnora any real love, and she refuses to part with money for “foolishness.”

Just when everything seems hopeless, Elnora hatches a plan to use the treasures of the Limberlost, the swampy forest near her home, to pay for her education. While hunting for and selling moths and other rare biological specimens, Elnora gradually uncovers the forest’s many mysteries, including a dark secret about her father and the key to the love her mother has hidden from her for so long.

A wonderful turn-of-the-century novel of discovery of identity, wonders of nature, friendship, family trust, love, and the process of growing up in the magical shadow of the Limberlost.

what lengths would you go to to get ___________.

I follow a couple YA literature review blogs, and I’ve entered contests to win books.  I’ve even won a couple (although one is still missing in transit or someone is playing an evil joke on me)!  It’s a real rush to win a free book.  I’m a huge bookworm, and I spend entirely too much money at bookstores and time at the public library.  So it follows that I’d be willing to do quite a lot to win another book.  Today I found out just how much, because Lenore put out a challenge on her blog: say to what lengths you’d be willing to go to get a book, and you could win 3.  Book in question is Catching Fire, the sequel to Hunger Games, which I’ve blogged about here.  I want this book.  I need this book.  And unless I miraculously win a contest, I will not get this book until it’s released in September.  BUT!  Back to the important stuff: things I would be willing to do to get novel I covet.

My automatic answers: I’d go wilderness camping - sans tent and camp stove - for a week.  Or pass out fliers in a public place for an hour.  I’ve done this before: it’s extremely hard and thankless.  I’d sing karaoke or do a stand-up routine; under normal circumstances I’d be averse to any suggestion of public speaking/singing/performing.  I might give up recreational reading for a week or two.  And lastly, if I could read a sequel early, (insert your own anticipated event here) I would volunteer as the cleaning lady of whoever gave it to me.  For a week.  But that could be negotiable. 

I was amazed to discover what I would (and what wouldn’t I do, really?) do to get something relatively small and unimportant to my survival.  So I thought I’d ask a couple of my siblings what they would be willing to do if they could get their hands on an advance copy of a sequel of another favorite book of ours, Graceling.

Joey’s answer (submitted via text message):  Find a semitruck carrying the books, shoot out the tires, and tase the driver before breaking into the truck with boltcutter and portable grinder while wearing safety glasses and gloves.

When I pointed out that above plan was criminal, the next response was as follows:  Okay, so…find a copy you can download online…Or if that isn’t possible, revert to plan A, or just wait.

Ginny’s answer (also texted):  Make a YouTube video or go on a food/hunger strike, or something like they used to do for 106.1 (local Top 40 music station in Seattle area) – stay in a Porta-Potty for days.  This is hypothetical, right???

What would you be willing to do for a book/other-thing-you-crave?

bookworm devours public library

Today's title doesn’t actually fit the content of this post, but it sounded too good in my head this morning to discard it completely.  So, welcome to a post on books (but not on long invertebrates without appendages, whether book-loving or not).

I told a friend the other day that I’d cried in Starbucks last week.  She looked at me with concern and said, “What’s the matter?”  The funny thing is, nothing’s the matter.  I was sitting there, drinking my coffee and reading a library book.  It was the book I cried over.  I have a tendency to do this.  I can even name you several books that I’ve read multiple times, and cry buckets over with each re-read.  They tend to be my favorites (no guesses as to why: they draw on my emotions!), and I own most of them.  Last week’s particular novel, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, will be added to the collection when it comes out in paperback. 

The Hunger Games is set in the post-apocalyptic former United States, now called Panem.  Katniss, the sixteen year-old narrator, struggles to support her family by poaching and entering herself for the yearly Hunger Games (in which contestants from the ‘Districts’ of Panem fight to the death in a huge outdoor arena) in order to receive an extra food subsidy.  This is the story of her reality, her survival, and the morality and conflict inherent in humanity’s choices.  It’s on the American Library Association’s list of the ten best books for young adults, and although I wouldn’t recommend it for readers younger than 10, is suitable for all ages.  The book is full of lessons in honesty, bravery, sacrifice, anger and helplessness.  It’s a masterfully written, gripping tale of endurance, and I can’t wait until the sequel comes out in October.

But, back to the theme of crying and books.  It happens.  Laughter also happens.  I’ve been known to startle fellow patrons in a coffee shop (or anywhere, really) while reading something funny.  It used to drive my college roommate absolutely batty.  We’d both be in the room, but while she was studying quietly, I was usually reading recreationally.  And I’d burst out with my loud cackle, and scare the dickens out of her.  Just one of the idiosyncrasies that she put up with (thank you for such an amazing/understanding roommate, God!), along with my inability to study IN our room (I had to go somewhere else…preferably the student union).  I don’t know if it’s a quirk of my upbringing or just genetics, but reality is that I respond in an emotional and physical way to the stories I read.  My mother used to read aloud to my siblings and me, and would cry over the sad parts too, until we begged her to ‘just keep on reading.’  Now I see how similar we really are.

A few books that make me cry: Rilla of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery, The Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, Phoenix and Ashes by Mercedes Lackey, Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson, Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson, and Three Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas Sparks.  And those are just the ones on my shelves at the moment.  I think a lot of the classics I read back from age 10-15 were tear-jerkers, too.  It’s probably a rule of good literature that along with being enduring, a classic work must evoke emotion.  I wouldn’t know, though, because I passed on being an English major in college when my 11th grade English teacher told me that I probably wouldn’t enjoy reading anymore after four years of literature analysis.  That scared me into entering college as a Biology and Spanish major, which morphed into Spanish and Communication Studies.  And in the end to History, where we read all the time, don’t get fancy with the writing styles, and there’s sometimes such a lack of emotion that the absence of it is palpable.  The good news being that I can keep my emotional and expressive reading on the “I do this for fun” side of things.

For books that make me laugh out loud:  there are many, but a good start would include Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, and anything by Diana Wynne Jones, although I especially love The Merlin Conspiracy, Howl’s Moving Castle, The House of Many Ways and the first five of the Chrestomanci Chronicles.

Whew!  Definitely too many book recommendations and mentions.  And I haven’t even gotten to the list of recommended YA fantasy that I put together for a friend’s daughter.  THAT is four pages long (single-spaced, too).  Puts a new complexion on the term ‘bookworm,’ doesn’t it?