15 things about me and books

[ellarien]

1. I keep track of my books in an Access database.
2. Currently there are 1158 entries in the database, but that doesn't count non-fiction back in England, which adds a few dozen more.
3. When I went away to university, my father dissuaded me from taking all my personal books along. He said I wouldn't have time to read them. I thought that was missing the point; it wasn't a case of reading them all in any given term, but of having them there in case I got the urge to read any given one.
4. As a result, I went looking for another copy of LOTR fairly early on, and thereby discovered that there was other 'grown up' fantasy in the world.
5. Therefore, I read Eddings and Donaldson, Anne McCaffrey, and Terry Brooks for the first time as an undergraduate. (I spent my teens reading Dickens and Dostoevsky, Eliot and Trollope, with Georgette Heyer for light relief.)
6. According to the database, I own 45 books I haven't read yet. (That's not counting one or maybe two wrapped Christmas gifts.)
7. A few years ago, that number was much higher, and I embarked on a systematic campaign of restricting purchases to four or six a month and trying to read ten books a month.
8. As a result, I hardly ever reread books these days, though I'd like to.
9. The database contains 264 books I've read more than once. A lot of those are childhood favourites.
9. I used the public library all the time as a child, but I've never belonged to one away from my home town and don't expect to. Frankly, when I'm working full-time and not driving, it's easier to buy books than borrow them.
10. If I'm reading a bulky hardcover, I'll often have a small paperback on the go at the same time, for bus rides and so forth.
11. I don't finish every book I start, but the number that I've deliberately abandoned after buying and starting is probably less than twenty, total.
12. For my eighth birthday, I was given a box set of the Chronicles of Narnia. A friend came over to tea, and I was rather disappointed that she didn't go for my proposal that she pick one and keep me company reading.
13. Just over half the books in my collection are SF and Fantasy.
14. The rest are an odd mixture of history, historical fiction, mysteries, reference, nineteenth-century classics, and a miscellany of which non-genre fiction is a small fraction.
15. I have a small collection of bookmarks, but mostly I use anything to hand -- bus tickets, dollar bills, boarding card stubs, garment tags ...