Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Bookish Confessions

August 28, 2012 at 7:23 am (Uncategorized)

Top Ten Tuesday is a wildly popular weekly meme hosted by the talented folks over at The Broke and the Bookish. Check out their blog to see what scores of other book bloggers came up with for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday.

I’ve been blogging for over two and a half years now, and most of the writing I do about books is pretty tame. However, if I were to have – like Dorian Gray – a second blog that I kept locked in the attic with a screen over it, these are some of the things that would be posted on it…

Bookish confessions:

1. I once used an old textbook as a coaster(!) I know, I know, it’s horrendous, but – if you knew my landlord at the time, NOT using a coaster may have led to an even hotter eternal damnation. Honorable mention here goes to the fact that I almost burned my Economics textbook in college.

2. I’ve never read any of the following: Ulysses, Sense and Sensibility, Don Quixote, Little Women, The Grapes of Wrath, Catcher in the Rye, etc. etc. See the Modern Library’s Top 100 Novels of All Time for another fifty or sixty. Fortunately, this list is getting shorter.

3. I have well over six hundred books in my house about one subject – chess. (I used to have a problem) In my defense (as if that statement were defensible!) I used to only have about half that many, but about ten years ago bought a fellow chess addict’s entire library when he was strapped for cash. I assumed he would buy them back at some point, but not yet.

4. I actually read “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Just the first book. It was written horribly enough that I didn’t go on. It had just become popular, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Sometimes this works out (e.g., Hunger Games, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) but sometimes it doesn’t.

5. I have so many books at my house I sometimes (well, often) can’t find one I’m looking for. Catcher in the Rye? The Great Gatsby? Hemingway’s short stories? Where, oh, where are you?!?

6. I am unable to listen to audio books while commuting back and forth to work. I envy people who are able to do this. Me, I’m just trying to “stay alive on I-465.”

7. I have books that people loaned me that I never returned. The opposite of this is also true. (Does that make it right?)

8. I am, for being an otherwise reasonably intelligent man, a pretty damn slow reader. I hate this.

9. I once hated reading about Greek and Roman mythology. (it was because I was being forced to read it for fifth or sixth grade when I wanted to be doing other things) I still can picture that onerous blue-covered edition of Bullfinch’s Mythology. Of course (happy ending), I love it now. I even was a Classics Minor in college.

10. Speaking of college, it’s time for my worst confession. My senior year I took a really neat class in medieval and middle English literature. I had a really weighty textbook for it that was chock full of some of the great works. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Beowulf, etc. Between the time of my last class and graduation, I sold it back to the bookstore so my fraternity brothers and I would have more money to buy beer.

Well, thats it. Guess I’ll see you “in the fires” – as Johnny Cash would sing.

What about you? Do you have any bookish confessions you’d like to make? It’s good for your bookish soul. Do you feel a little bit better about yours now??