2. What are you reading right now? A bunch of things! -Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy -The Chomsky-Foucault Debate -Music for Torching- A. M. Homes -Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen -Dubliners- James Joyce -Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls- David Sedaris I’m just about the halfway point, if not over it, with all these books save Dubliners.
3. What books do you have on request at the library? I don’t use the library like I ought, but I have a Strand giftcard and the first thing on my list to buy is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. That book is one of my summer reading goals.
5. What do you currently have checked out at the library? Again, no library use.
7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once? Several! Spanning multiple genres! I never know just what mood I’m gonna be in.
11. How often do you read out of your comfort zone? I have a broad comfort zone, so rarely. The only things truly outside of it are sci-fi (that isn’t dystopic/political in some way) and fantasy, both of which I rarely read. With the exception of Haruki Murakami’s magical realism.
13. Can you read on the bus? That, during the schoolyear, is where I get the bulk of my reading done.
17. Do you ever write in the margins of your books? Only always
19. What is your favourite language to read in? I am limited to English for the most part.
23. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did)? More politically oriented literature in the non-fic zone. I’ll be doing far more of this over summer.
29. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience. Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. That’s the big hit of his, but I found it more fixated on sensationalism and wild storylines than actual content, in comparison with his other works.
31. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews? As a person that does a tonload of writing myself I can be hesitant to do so. I’ll always discuss from within the book and I never give a review that doesn’t reference any redeeming quality in the book (because nothing, typically, is complete shit. It ain’t that simple). I try to also make it more constructive than just bashing it, in that I’ll discuss why it failed for me as a reader in certain ways and how that affected my enjoyment of the book as a whole. Also, it’s always important to be sensitive to logical fallacy as a reader because that’s just the writer tryin to trick ya. The only time I’ve given a pissed offish review is the You Deserve Nothing which, as fiction, would be a pretty alright novel (a clear first novel attempt but it was fairly solid!) however when it was revealed that it was actually thinly veiled memoir which victim blamed and glorified abusers and gave voices to characters where the author has no right to give them his own voice, I was enraged and felt robbed.
37. How often have you returned books to the library unread? When I was younger I had a thing where if I lost my place in a book and couldn’t find it again, I refused to finish the book. Does that count? Other than that, rarely.
39. Favourite fictional villain? I LOVE THIS QUESTION. Tyler Durden, V, Meursault, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, everyone in We, are all characters that can be seen as villains but aren’t 100% villainous in the universal perspective. There are times when you love them and their causes and times when you cringe.
41. The longest I’ve gone without reading. In my reading career… probably about two or three weeks tops. In terms of personal reading then it might be longer, as in a month or two.
43. What distracts you easily when you’re reading? Thoughts that branch off from the text itself. Also stress and people.
47. How often do you skim a book before reading it? I’ll do that with nonfic sometimes to view the frame and then later zero in on the specificity. I try not to with fiction anymore, but sometimes I can’t help.
53. A book you didn’t expect to like but did? Pride and Prejudice, or at least the 200 some pages thus far. I’ve never been into older texts and I feared lots of archaic happenings, language, sentiments and whatnot. I’m finding the book to be a huge and fast page turner for me with tons of pretty radical ideas within it. I’m really enjoying it a ton.
