Space Station Mir

Question(s) Do you own multiple copies of any book? What are they? Why do you have multiple copies? My Answer: I do own multiple copies of multiple books. Most notably, I own two or three copies of every Jane Austen book. Why? Good question, bit of a long story. First, my parents own a copy of Pride and Prejudice , which is the copy I read when I read it for the first time. Then, I decided I wanted my own copy, so I bought one. Additionally, I more recently discovered a copy of Pride and Prejudice that I think came from my elementary school library. Oops. As for the other books, I bought my own copies of Sense and Sensibility , Emma , and Persuasion and stole my mother's copy of Mansfield Park . Then came college. I bought Northanger Abbey for an eighteenth-century lit class. The next summer, I took a Jane Austen course, and we were required to have a pack of the Norton editions of every book. In sum, I've ended up with 3-4 copies of P&P and two of all the rest.

I recently joined LibraryThing, and I'm still figuring it out, as there is quite a lot going on, and I'm not the most tech-savvy. Still, I've added the Currently Reading widget to my sidebar and I've entered in a small percentage of my books, those that I feel are most representative of my taste and my collection at large. At some point, I will get a paid account and enter them all, but that's an endeavor for a long period of time. Among my most interesting discoveries so far have been early reviewer books that I can request, lottery-style, from publishers. I've done so for June, so fingers crossed! I've also been checking out recommendations based on my books, and I just found my library statistics, which are surprisingly mesmerizing. I've discovered that 52.17% of my favorite books were written by women, 47.8% by men and only 38.1% of the authors are alive, as opposed to the collections of 91% of other LibraryThing users. Things may be slower as ...

Question: What fictional character are you (secretly) in love with? My Answer: Well, it won't be a secret anymore, but my current fictional crush is Peeta Mellark, from The Hunger Games . In the eponymous Games, it's Peeta's public declaration of love for Katniss that makes her a hot contender, and I'd be lying if I said his love for her wasn't part of her attraction to the reader as well. While Katniss isn't sure she loves him back, I was rooting for Peeta all along. Peeta risks (and faces) injury, humiliation, and death to save Katniss, but it's not just this seemingly macho display that makes him such a winning guy. Peeta is genuinely sweet and thoughtful, he's artistic, he's a genius at frosting cakes! He's a charming speaker too, but has no stomach for fighting or betrayal. Even while he constantly tries to protect Katniss, Peeta is the one who truly needs to be protected-and whose goodness is deserving of protection. Basically, Peeta is...

34. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger I actually resisted reading this book because it was such a bestseller and garnered the label "romance." I tend to eschew romance and romantic fiction, mostly because swooning ladies, knights in shining armor, and awkward sex scenes are not my idea of good literature. Everybody raving about it made me want to read it less. Well, finally, I caught it lying around my house. It turned out to belong to a friend of my sister's, and it just looked more interesting than anything on my shelf. The Time Traveler's Wife indeed fits the romance genre better than the science fiction genre in which it is also sometimes placed, but with a caveat-this is GOOD romance. I know, I never thought I'd hear myself saying it either. The time-traveling gimmick makes for exquisite plotting and the back-and-forth through time makes for a compelling tension between Clare, the time traveler's chrono-linear wife, and Henry, her chr...

Question: What was your favorite book at the age of 9 1/2 or 13 3/4? Whichever you remember best. My Answer: I remember when I was around 9 1/2, my absolute favorite book was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. I borrowed it from the library and read it twice in a row. I talked about it for months. Still, I didn't realize, and I suppose no one knew to tell me, that it was part of the Time Quartet, which I didn't read till years later. And I didn't own a copy of A Wrinkle in Time until last summer when I helped teach it in a Modern Fantasy class for fourth and fifth graders. My favorite parts include the first encounter with Mrs. Whatsit "There is such a thing as a tesseract", Mrs. Who's explanation of a tesseract, like two points on a line being suddenly pulled next to each other, and especially the Happy Medium. I went to see the play last year and just as Meg figured out how to get into her father's cell, the fire alarm went off. It fit in ...

33. The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martel I polished this off in one day of riding around the Metro. The second story in the collection takes place in D.C. as a matter of fact. The title story unfortunately did not live up to the curiosity its title induced. It felt very typical of the sort of story one might find in a literary magazine, a college boy's account of dealing with a friend dying of AIDS. The Helsinki Roccamatios are a fictional family the boys invent to pass the time and create a distraction. Family events are based on events from an encyclopedia of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the readers don't get to hear the stories, only the facts, that is the encyclopedia entries, behind them. This was one of those incredibly frustrating stories when you don't want to be reading what you're reading, you want to read the stories the characters you're reading about are creating. They sound a lot more interesting and I wish writers woul...

Today, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios came in the mail from Bookmooch. I'm a fan of Life of Pi , so hopefully I'll enjoy Martel's earlier work. On the other hand, I'm thinking of issuing myself a moratorium on new books. I have a few books on my shelves that I haven't read (though most don't really interest me either...) and there's always the library. I really can't afford new books in terms of space or money. Someday. Now, to another book meme question: What is your earliest memory of reading or being read to? To be honest, I'm not sure. My parents read to me all the time as a small child, so much so that I memorized books and thought that meant I knew how to read. I remember books like Nicholas the Bunny, Goodnight Moon, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, a book about little cats that ate cereal, and more. My mom read me the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. The first book I learned to read was about Bert and Ernie from Sesame St...

I obtained a list of book meme questions from http://book-memes.livejournal.com/ and on days when I don't have a book review or thoughts on a book to post, I will answer one of these questions. Please feel free to post your own answers to the question in the comments! First Question: Which fictional character do you identify with and why? My Answer: The answer that always comes first in my mind is Jo March. I read Little Women when I was young and it was a very influential book for me. I remember feeling vividly whatever Jo was feeling, outrage at Amy, responsibility for her family, confusion about Laurie. Jo was exactly the kind of person I wanted to be and who I felt I resembled at heart. Like her, I fought with my sister, loved to act, loved to read and write, hated clothes, liked being outdoors, and was bad at pretending to be someone I wasn't. I've always thought that Jo and I would have gotten on very well.

32. Songs for the Butcher's Daughter by Peter Manseau I read about this book in Hadassah magazine because it was a National Jewish Book Award winner. I picked up a used copy at Harvard Book Store about a month ago, and a few days ago dug it out of one of my boxes of books. The book quickly fit into a comfortable tradition for me, a book like The History of Love, People of the Book, Everything is Illuminated and other modern Jewish fiction. One of the main characters or rather, "the translator," is, like the actual author, not Jewish, but a Catholic raised in Boston. The book takes place in Massachusetts and in Baltimore, Maryland, both places I know well. Even the saga of the book's fictional author, Itsik Malpesh, from Kishinev to Odessa to New York City, feels familiar from my reading,though I have never been to the first two and never lived in the last. The unnamed translator begins the book with the story of how he came to learn Yiddish, pass for Jewish, an...

I'm in a transitional life phase, so to speak, and I just moved back to live with my parents for the summer. As both my home and dorm rooms were overflowing with books and the situation is getting untenable, I've managed to convince myself to let go of those books that I'm fairly sure I will never read again. I've been a member of Bookmooch since 2009, and I just listed 8 books in my inventory, probably more to come. I've enjoyed being a member of Bookmooch, I've managed to get a few titles I was interested in and more that I found through browsing the Bookmooch inventory. While the selection is not always inspiring, it's a great tool and I would definitely encourage more people to join, so more books can be shared. It's exciting to be notified whenever a book on my wishlist is available, and I have to race to get to it first! How does this help with overflow? In the long term, not much. However, this way I can build up points for books, sort of an i...

30. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins 31. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins I read The Hunger Games , the first book in the trilogy, a few months ago and have been eager ever since to read the remaining two books. This weekend, I went on a binge and read them both in a couple of days. The best thing about this series, which did not disappoint in either of the sequels, is the protagonist's perspective. While I don't think a different perspective would have hurt and might have livened things up at points, Katniss Everdeen continues to be her cranky, fearful, dangerous, and unyielding self and I can imagine her having written every word. Collins has created a strong female character who is neither a bitch nor a Mary Sue, and that's an accomplishment in my book, besides damn entertaining. I'm not at all like her, but I can still relate to her. I had a lot of guesses about how this series would go and I was right on most of them. There were a few twists I didn't see c...

29. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer I read this book out of curiosity. Out of a desire to say "Look, I read this book, but it didn't change my life. I'm still not a vegetarian!" Now...I think I might become a vegetarian. I expected this book to show me how the meat industry is horrible. I expected animal mistreatment, threats of infectious disease, threats to the environment. I never though the factory farming industry was a model to look up to. I didn't expect it to be pretty. But what I didn't bargain on were two things. First, the scale of the threat to human health and environment and yes, the scale of the animal cruelty, and Two, Foer's ability to tell a gosh-darn persuasive story and unabashed willingness to tell people exactly what they can do to help the situation. I admit, I should not have underestimated Foer, but I did, and now I'm stuck with the consequences. What caught my eye as I flipped through was this passage: "I, ...

In Feminism is for Everybody , I was struck by hooks' sharp differentiation between reformist and revolutionary feminism. If you read the passages below, you can see that hooks identifies herself as one of the revolutionary feminists, whom she refers to as "we," while she refers to reformist feminists as "them." Certainly, hooks makes a salient point when she recognizes that achieving the goals of reformist feminists has not ended sexism. One of the complaints of anti-feminists is that women are trying to be like men, what hooks says of the reformist feminists. Revolutionary feminism, as I understand it at least, would change the system so that there is no longer this perception of women trying to be like men-women are trying to be women, are trying to be people. It is these artificial men/women roles that are the problem, in my mind. And these roles result from what hooks is fighting against, a patriarchal society, a hierarchy of domination. Let's take away...