Book Tag!

How do you find out about new books to read?

Sam ~ All sorts of places. I get lots of recommendations from friends and the goodreads app, and lately I’ve been getting reading inspiration from YouTube as well. I have a huge to-read list of books mentioned by my favourite YouTube bloggers.

Kelly – I also have a huge to-read list, but I very rarely make a dent in it. Usually I go to the book store and spend a glorious hour exploring the shelves to find what moves me. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover is a rule I have never, ever, ever followed.

How did you get into reading?

Sam ~ My parents (thankfully) sort of forced reading onto me. When I was six or seven they made a deal with me: I could stay up 30 minutes past my usual bedtime if I used that time to read. At first I oh so sneakily pretended to be reading (which involved blankly staring at a page for 30 minutes), but slowly realized that I actually enjoyed comprehending the words on the page. Reading every day became a routine and then an obsession.

Kelly – I was actually quite a poor, unenthusiastic reader when I was very young. So poor, in fact, that I had to do a bit of summer school after kindergarten and was in a remedial reading group in first grade. One afternoon I was complaining to my mother about how all of my friends were in a different reading group and they got to read cooler stories than I did. Well, she said to me with exasperation, if you applied yourself to reading, maybe you could move up to their level. For better or worse, I’ve always been the kind of person who needed some tangible motivation to get my butt in gear. The juicy carrot of reading with my friends was enough to convince me to put in the slightest bit of effort, and I quickly rose up in the reading group ranks – right to the very top, thank you very much. Not long after that I stumbled upon a giant, pink book of princess fairy tales with silver-edged pages that completely enchanted me in the store. Always down to bribe for a good cause, my Mom agreed to buy me the book on the condition that I read it aloud to her, not the other way around. Reading then made the transition from something I did as a means to an end, to an end in and of itself. Yay!

How has your taste in books changed as you’ve grown older?

Sam ~ I moved from the pre-teen section of the bookstore to the Young Adult section to the regular adult fiction section. I’ve also started to read non-fiction books, notably travel literature, memoirs, or adventure novels.

Kelly – I have also made the shift to loving non-fiction, which is quite radical in retrospect. I don’t think I ever even considered reading non-fiction books by myself before Big Magic changed my life.

How often do you buy books?

Sam ~ Unfortunately not as much as I would like. Books are expensive and my college student budget doesn’t really support bulk book buying. Plus, every book I buy will eventually have to be transported back home or wherever I decide to move after graduation – damn you, airplane weight limits.

Kelly – Probably more often than I should. Aside from my summer of Nancy Drew where I biked to the library for a new installment every two days or so, I have never really been a library person and that is something I feel guilty about. For some reason, I just love owning books. I love touching them and looking at them and lending them out. But damn are they an expensive habit!

How did you get into book reviewing?

Sam ~ I’m the type of person who will read an amazing book and blabber about it to all my friends for weeks trying to get everyone to read it too. I suppose this naturally extended into book reviewing online – a wider audience to blabber too.

Kelly – the one thing I miss about high school is English class. I loved reading and discussing and making sense of texts as a group. We had a book club for a time last year that helped to replicate that, but it was something that wasn’t sustainable due to scheduling difficulties. I’d love to rebuild that sense of community around reading and literature. I love seeing what other people think about books, and I love hearing what other people have to say about what I have to say. If I read it and don’t talk about it, there’s a lot of potential value that can never be realized.

How do you react when you don’t like the ending of a book?

Sam ~ If the book has really affected me then a disappointing ending tends to stay with me for weeks afterword – I will dwell on it until I drive myself crazy.

Kelly – Generally, cry.

How often do you take a sneak peek at the ending to see if there’s a happy ending?

Sam ~ NEVER. I don’t like spoilers.

Kelly – This is a crime. Do not do this. Please.

 

We’d like to thank Abi Leah for tagging us, once again! The timing for this tag could not have been more perfect. We’ve been on a reading streak through the first few months of 2016, and have really enjoyed posting monthly about books. It is something that we want to keep up… unfortunately for both of us March was a pretty sparse reading month.

We are both in the middle of very long tomes. I am just over 400 pages into Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Sam is enjoying meandering through A Brief History of Nearly Everything by the venerable Bill Bryson. We’re considering this tag to be our March Reading Post.

This tag was so fun to answer so we’d like to pass it on to fellow book-loving bloggers out there.

1. An Historian About Town
2. Handknit Shipwreck
3. Aspiring Blue Cat
4. Happy Alex
5. Crazy Spoonfuls

Happy Friday! We’d love to see anyone answer these! xx