1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?
Hmm, I believe it’s my Carmen Sandiego books (Colour Me Criminal, The Cocoa Commotion, Take the Mummy and Run and Hasta La Vista Blarney!); I learned a lot from those books =D

 

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you’ll read next?
Last read: David Hewson’s The Garden of Evil
Current read: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (re-read)
Next read: Toss-up between Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Anna Gavalda’s Hunting and Gathering. Or maybe Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Hmm, too many books on my to-read list xD

 

3. What book did everyone like and you hated?
I heard wonderful things about Maguire’s Wicked but I dunno, I thought it was okay, nothing spectacular. I’m also currently re-reading Kostova’s The Historian to see if my opinion will change; I love the research and the history but I found the writing and the plot rather dry and way too drawn out…maybe a second read will change my mind?

 

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you’ll read, but you probably won’t?
Rodgers’s The Safeguard of the Sea and Coelho’s The Zahir

5. Which book are you saving for “retirement?”
Life’s too short; got to read as much as you can now 😉

 

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?
I try to wait until the end, however there’s been an occasion where I have flipped to the end to see what the last line says *blushes*

 

7. Acknowledgements: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?
Interesting aside, though I’ve only bothered to read them in a few books…

 

8. Which book character would you switch places with?
Good question; maybe Anne Elliot from Persuasion (if only to have a man like Captain Wentworth write a letter like that to me—you guys know what letter I’m talking about ;)) or maybe Eowyn from LOTR…a little bit frightful given that it was the War of the Ring at the time but I’d trade places with someone on Middle Earth to get a chance to live there…save for like, the orcs and the Haradrim, of course 🙂

 

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?
LOTR and Williams’s Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy remind me of my high school years 🙂

 

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.
I got The Complete Works of William Shakespeare at a book sale at university for cheap…its cover is leather and it was published in 1923. Has to be the greatest buy I’ve ever had book-wise 😀

 

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?
Not that I can think of…

 

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?
Again, none that I can think of…

 

13. Any “required reading” you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?
Ehh, haven’t re-read all of the books I’ve read in high school. One story I do have is that I read Pride and Prejudice in Grade 11 and didn’t think much of the book at the time (had to write an ISU essay on the book, that’s why—it was my favourite from the batch that year though). I decided to re-read it again when I was in first year university (especially with the movie coming out and everything) and fell in love with it completely. So it was more of a meh to yay reaction rather from hate to okay kind of thing.

 

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?
Um, I don’t know?

 

15. Used or brand new?
New please *blushes*

 

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?
Don’t really have an opinion on this one, I don’t read his stuff.

 

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?
Good question, movies and adaptations have their own merits from the books. I’ve seen a number of adaptations that were pretty horrid renditions of the book but I can’t really think of a movie adaptation that was better than the book…oh wait, actually, from what I heard of the book, I prefer the movie adaptation of The Painted Veil 🙂

 

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?
Eragon—five seconds into the movie my brother and I already started poking fun at it. That was not good; it totally destroyed whatever interest I had in the books to begin with (and I did read the first book).

 

19. Have you ever read a book that’s made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?
Frances Mayes’s A Year in the World; makes me wish I could travel to all those places and eat all that food she mentioned throughout 🙂

 

20. Who is the person whose book advice you’ll always take?
I listen to everyone on my LJ list and my friends in RL (who read a lot of books) and make a decision about particular recommendations from there 🙂