A wonderful idea from Bookeywookey (who has one of the best blog names ever)
20 Years Ago:Well this takes me back to Portland, OR and the wonderful age of The Babysitter’s Club, Christopher Pike horror novels, my first experiences with Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and spending my summers on local library reading competitions.
10 Years Ago:This is much more fun: Living in Paris, reading as much Françoise Sagan and Annie Ernaux as I could find. Hunting through old paperbacks at Tea and Tattered pages or Gilbert Jeune, struggling to read Flaubert and Descartes for my classes and in general LOVING everything about the new world of literature that I had suddenly, amazingly, at my fingertips.
5 Years Ago: Transitioning from two years in Japan to a short year in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. A particularly difficult/wonderful year that ended up enriching my life in several ways: a) I met my husband b) I discovered an eternal love for the Swiss writer Durrenmatt (introduced to me by said husband c) I applied for graduate school and read as much fiction as I could find in as many literary journals as I could get. Favorites that have stayed with me are Glimmertrain, The Paris Review, Ploughshares.
3 Years ago:Living in Providence, RI, working for a book publisher in Boston and finishing my Master’s degree in creative writing/translation. I was reading a lot, commuting with books on tape as well as books for school. Some favorites from then: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, To the Wedding by John Berger, The Pick-up by Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.
Last Year: Celebrating my first year in Switzerland, getting very busy with translating work. In terms of reading habits, trying to balance Swiss and French fiction with literature in English. I have always been a big reader but since moving to Switzerland I have really made a strong commitment to my reading. I started reading more seriously and with more focus.
This Month:I just finished Middlesex and I am now getting through Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes. I am also finishing up Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
3 Favorite Reading Locations: the garden when it is sunny…the couch with a blanket and a cup of tea…in bed
3 Reading habits: I read all the time, while waiting for the kettle to boil, before bed, at lunch…I keep a spreadsheet (I know, I know, don’t laugh) with the books I am currently reading and books I want to read soon…I take a lot of notes about what I’m reading – on little sticky notes so I don’t write on the pages (a habit I am trying to break)
3 Things that distract me: being too sleepy…thinking about another book…loud noises
3 Characters I’d love to be: I am not sure I would ever want to BE a character in a book. I will have to think more about this one.
3 Characters I despise: I don’t despise any character, even evil characters can be fascinating
3 Favorite Book Beverages: tea…hot chocolate…glass of wine
3 Favorite bookmarks: a postcard I found in a thriftstore book, written in German…a book “thong” a friend of mine gave me with a little silver strappy shoe at the bottom…a sticky note
3 Dead Writers I’d love to meet:Virginia Woolf…Anton Chekhov…Carson McCullers
3 Alive Writers I’d love to meet:Nadine Gordimer…I don’t really idolize anyone else so I will leave it at that
2 responses so far ↓
dew // September 28, 2007 at 2:44 pm |
I’ve really been enjoying reading these, from all sorts of blogs, so I think I’ll do one of my own. You’ve really moved around a lot!
verbivore // October 1, 2007 at 7:37 am |
Dew – this one has been fun. Book-related histories are a great way to get to know someone.