I had forgotten the read-a-thon started today! But then I remembered! And here I am, doing today’s challenge, which is a bookish survey.
1. How do you organize your shelves?
…I don’t! I just don’t have room for organization. Not in my book shelves, at least. I have a huge digital book collection which is also left mostly unorganized – all I really do is sort them into “finished reads” as I go along. To me, organization is much less of a necessity when you have a decent search function. Of course, if I couldn’t just type a part of a title or author’s name and press find it for me please and watch the magic happen, I’d have to employ some organization scheme – but, well. I live in the future! Yay, future.
2. What is one of your favorite book that’s not in one of your favorite genres?
Huh. Two titles come to mind – they’re both realistic YA fiction, which makes me wonder if maybe that’s a genre I like better than I think I do, but… I’m running with it.
There’s On the Jellicoe road by Melina Marchetta, which has stayed in my head since I read it, re-appearing every once in a while to say hello, yes, story still here. Kinda like the movie Now and then, which has a few similar traits, being a coming-of-age friendship type of thing. I watched that movie eating popcorn with a school friend and her mom, and I read the book by myself in my bed as an adult, but, uh, I remember both of these times as lovely because of story immersion. So that’s… that.
The other book is I miss you, I miss you! by Peter Pohl and Kinna Gieth. It’s about teenaged twin sisters, who aren’t exactly best friends, and that would be okay, except Cilla gets hit by that car and dies, while Tina lives. This Swedish book came my way through a book club when I was… younger than the main characters, so, basically, a hundred years ago. I’ve only ever read it in Norwegian, but I expect it to be exactly as heartbreaking in English.
My gut reaction to the genre “realistic YA” is, I admit, “embarrassing and likely not terribly interesting to me”. In the hands of the right kind of writer, though, I believe any genre can impress me.
3. What is the last 5 star book you read?
Rolling in the deep by Mira Grant. I’m such a fangirl. And it’s a perfect silly-horror with deep ocean creepiness, which is always delightful.
4. What book are you most excited to read during the read-a-thon?
I’m going to finish my currents, and then I’m biting into Ramez Naam’s Apex. In recent weeks I’ve read Nexus and Crux, and I’m very, very impatient to see how this goes. I’m also pretty excited to read this big, tasty book about the black death. Mmm, plague.
5. What book do you recommend the most?
That is such an impossible question, because it depends entirely on who I’m making a recommendation to. But two recs I often make to a lot of people are Charles Stross’ The Laundry series, because they’re clever and funny books that are perhaps especially amusing to programmers and IT people (but that doesn’t exclude other kinds of people) – and Peter Watts’ Blindsight and Echopraxia. Those two books are… so dense, so packed with intensely interesting things, and so glittery dark, it’s just hard to say anything coherent about without a lot of arm-flailing. And to non-fic pop sciencey kind of readers, I often mention The storytelling animal, which is a crazy and inspiring and educational book.
So there. I was interrupted while writing this. An episode of Daredevil and a coffee mocha happened to me. When I say mocha I mean “One regular coffee pod with two heaping teaspoons of pure cacao powder, a glug of full-fat cream, and some vanilla stevia. It was delicious. And Daredevil is a lot better in the second-to-last episode than it was in the second one. Just saying. Now I go try to finish reading Dreams of shreds and tatters even though I’d really much rather read Crowley’s Little, big. Life is hard.