"But...but...you HAVE to help me!"

[Alpha Strike]

I don't tend to do this as much now but, I used to read a little into the book, and then read the last page, just the last page, and continue with the book...

I found it didn't ruin the end for me, in fact I enjoyed it more as I wondered how it would build up to the end, and I would enjoy the construction process.

Add me to the list - I do this at times both because I'm curious and I know I'll forget the ending within 15 minutes of going back to the part of book I had actually reached.

Bliss, I do the same thing. Read a chapter or two, flip to the end. I do it a lot while reading.

I also have the habit of reading about 5 books at once. One in each room. I can't wait till we go camping this weekend so I can catch up on my reading a little.

And I thank you guys for pointing me in the direction of the Dresden books. Finished the first one in about 3 days and have the second one and the first one of his other series waiting till this weekend.


Is there a windows verison of Delicious Library? or something that would be like it. And does it work on DVDs? I have a little collection that really needs to be cataloged

First, glad to see another Dresden fan. Good stuff! I have a few minor issues with the books, but overall I'm really digging the series even though he's up to book 8 or 9 (?).

Secondly, I also enjoy "littering" my household with different books I'm reading. I get a lot of reading done in the bathroom (Yeah, it's what guys do!) and so I'll leave different tittles scattered in each of them, as well as by the bed. It can sometimes get confusing when I go from one book to a second to a third and then back again but I'm never short on reading material!

Finally, I'm going to be picking up Delicious Library for my Mac - from what I can remember, it can scan pretty much anything that has a SKU/UPC and is in its library or is searchable online. If my memory doesn't fail me, I can drop you a quick note once I've had time to use it.

300pages? In middle school they made us read 400pg over about a month. When I turned in my (many many) sheets, I was up to 18,000 or so - and I hadn't logged everything.

I have to know: how could you (especially in middle school) have time to slog through 18000 pages in a month? In doing the math you'd have to be reading at an amazing rate:

There are roughly 43200 minutes in a month, 1/3 of which would go towards sleeping, eating and bathing. That leaves roughly 28,800 minutes, meaning you'd have to devote half of all your waking time to just reading.

[crazylegs]

I read about 300 pages per hour. .

A page every 12 seconds? Wow, that's impressive!

[Calie]

Secondly, I also enjoy "littering" my household with different books I'm reading. I get a lot of reading done in the bathroom (Yeah, it's what guys do!) and so I'll leave different tittles scattered in each of them, as well as by the bed. It can sometimes get confusing when I go from one book to a second to a third and then back again but I'm never short on reading material!

Heh, I'm a girl but that doesn't stop me :P Oh, and the books I leave around I try to make different genres, that way it's less confusing. Let me tell you, reading 2 romance novels at once is impossible (they are all way too alike).

I have to know: how could you (especially in middle school) have time to slog through 18000 pages in a month? In doing the math you'd have to be reading at an amazing rate:

There are roughly 43200 minutes in a month, 1/3 of which would go towards sleeping, eating and bathing. That leaves roughly 28,800 minutes, meaning you'd have to devote half of all your waking time to just reading.

1. The 1month / 18K pages may not be exact (it may have been 6weeks).
2. I usually went to a "academically challenging" private school, this was when I was in public school for a semester (thank you mom for taking a sabbatical and dragging us with you); which meant:
a: Taking 1 less class (World Civ wasn't offered at the school) which was replaced by a "study period" which I did by myself in the library (seriously, they just let me do whatever I want...which was to read anything I could find).
b: The rest of my classes were easy and light on hwk.
3. I also had more time to read: bus rides and no TV at home
4. They didn't specify what types of books to read (whatever I could find, mostly below my reading level)
5. I read really fast.

So no, not half my waking time...but probably a quarter of it...

[Severen13]

Another bookworm here.

It makes me sad to hear people say that they hate to read. I just don't get it. I really don't.

I started out with Dr. Suess and Berenstein Bears, then worked up to Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume. It wasn't long (we're talking grade school) before I got my grubby little hands my dad's Stephen King novels and my mother's mystery/detective novels.

I just finished a great mystery called "Starvation Lake" and am now reading "The Manchurian Candidate". After that I'm going to read "Dearly Devoted Dexter".

But thankfully I've discovered the wonders of PaperBackSwap.com. I've just requested a few more books for myself and a few for my mother as a surprise because I'm such a good daughter.

[dalesys]

I was incarcerated for 12 years for reading...














In the State Childrens Prison...

AKA: The Idiot-Creational System.

My mother wanted to register jail me for first grade...

I was suspicious, but she said, "Just come see what it's like..."

There was a big table covered in Little Golden Books. I dove in caroling: "Enlist me! Now!"

I never saw those books again...

[Tigress]

Same here. The thing is, I wound up studying English in college (my focus was more on linguistics than lit, however). I actually *hate* dissecting stories for "meaning", intended or otherwise. I feel that, if it's not interesting to read, it's not worth reading, no matter how "deep" it's supposed to be. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment.

I hated it myself. If the book fails to hold my attention, I don't care about how the flower in the parlor is symbolic of the post-war hedonism of early 20th-century deconstructionism. I'll reach for Stephen King and read about a telekinetic schoolgirl getting even at the prom.

In fact, I only read a handful of Cleary and Blume titles because I didn't find them interesting. Part of the reason was my "reading extension"* teacher insisted on reading them to us and yelled at me for not paying attention to her. I didn't see the point in listening to her when I could easily read it to myself in two days.

_______________________

*Translation: Stupid busywork. It was meant to enhance students' reading skills, but I didn't need it since I already read at a college level.

[JoitheArtist]

In fact, I only read a handful of Cleary and Blume titles because I didn't find them interesting.

I read some of them, but mostly because my reading skills far outstripped my emotional maturity at one point (right around age 11) and so I wasn't ready for the books that I COULD read, and was horribly bored by books that were still appropriate.

Years later I discovered the Redwall series, and cursed my childhood library for not having them. Those would have been *perfect.* Sigh.

Fortunately, that period of my life only lasted about a year. Then I launched into reading stuff like Moby Dick (which I LOVED), Last of the Mohicans, Brothers Karamazov (another favorite), etc.

[ExiledV20]

considering readin Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton....but decided against it...my brain might not be able to handle so much overblown prose.

For overblown prose that is extremely entertaining (and devoid of pseudo-Lovecraftian pretention ), I highly recommend the works of Jack Vance. If you can find a collection of his "Tales of the Dying Earth" or "The Demon Princes" saga (good scifi, that last one) you are in for a treat.

[Dreamstalker]

Sure, you got to the end, but how? Show your work (Yeah, yeah, I hated it in my math class when I had to... I could make multiple intuitive leaps in a single step during math problems, and get them right.)

Have you heard of something called "Interactive Math Program"? I was an unfortunate part of the pilot for that program here in my town, and their focus was on showing your work, even if the end answer was completely wrong (which most were).

I would show my work, but still get marked down as my answer was "wrong"...it was mathematically correct, but apparently they didn't want that

I hated it myself. If the book fails to hold my attention, I don't care about how the flower in the parlor is symbolic of the post-war hedonism of early 20th-century deconstructionism.

Ditto. I was reading at a ninth-grade level when I was in fifth grade, my English teacher then loved it and didn't care what I read as long as I could do the work on what was assigned.

High school...GAH. To this day I despise The Great Gatsby...it wasn't interesting to me in the least and the teacher accused me of plagiarism for the assigned essay just because I had help writing it. Despite my raft of proof to the contrary, she still failed me for the semester and I was never able ("allowed") to appeal.

I think I've already posted about my senior-year English class (the ONE class that was preventing me from graduating on time, so I had to take a fifth year just for that)...it actually reached the status of in-game running joke in the RPG group I was part of.

ETA: Somewhere, I stumbled across a psychoanalytic essay on Ghostbusters...heavy on the Freudian stuff and funny as hell. Some things were just not meant to be deconstructed that far.

[Andara Bledin]

Mmm.... books... nom-nom-nom...

I counted, once, and figured that by the time I hit high school, I'd easily read more than 1000 books, and nothing with less than 50 pages counted. I was one of those kids that would read personal books in class. But I never got in trouble for it, 'cause I could divide my attention. Although, more recently, I have been known to miss my bus stop because I was reading.

My junior high (6-8 grades) had a thing they did every year to encourage reading. Basically, you'd read, turn in sheets for every 100 pages (or so, higher grades required more pages per sheet), and at the end of every week for a month, they'd pull half a dozen sheets turned in that week, and the name pulled got to grab a handful of change (including a few dollar and half-dollar coins) from a jar. All three years, it was me and one other kid, and he had really long fingers (he was a bean-pole) and could grab a huge amount of change each time. They wouldn't let me have him grab for me; but I tried!

Butcher has made me buy hardbacks. I almost never buy hardbacks, but I buy his, 'cause I just don't want to wait. The Dresden series is a lot of pulpy fun, but the Alera series does so many things right that I always gush when talking about it.

ETA: Somewhere, I stumbled across a psychoanalytic essay on Ghostbusters...heavy on the Freudian stuff and funny as hell. Some things were just not meant to be deconstructed that far.

Heh. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

^-.-^

[EricKei]

Have you heard of something called "Interactive Math Program"? I was an unfortunate part of the pilot for that program here in my town, and their focus was on showing your work, even if the end answer was completely wrong (which most were).

I apparently wound up in elementary school just as our system was beginning to phase out "New Math" (I've never actually figured out the distinction between that and "standard"). Naturally, the teachers went right back to normal math and taught as if we had been using "normal" math all along...I think this is one of the major contributing factors to my loathing of the subject. Well, that, and one weird/semi-traumatic incident when I was a yung'un...I was out sick one day when the concept of "greater than-less than" was introduced to us for the very first time (as I said, YOUNG). When I came back the next day, the teacher gave us a quiz...and refused to explain what those funny-looking > and < signs on the paper meant, so I just had to pick answers at random....Suffice it to say, I didn't do well on the quiz, and the teacher could not comprehend why that would be the case...

[ArcticChicken]

I counted, once, and figured that by the time I hit high school, I'd easily read more than 1000 books, and nothing with less than 50 pages counted.

Wait, you can remember how many books you've read? Or did you work out some kind of formula?

[Dreamstalker]

Heh. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Oh, it had the muses laughing for days (the analysis of what remains of the Fort Detmerring sequence was hysterical).

I did find something similar on OverthinkingIt, but the original essay circa 1994 (which took itself way too seriously) seems to have been lost forever.

A library near where I grew up in Montpelier was similar to the NYPL in terms of the looming stacks and a mildly creepy basement (fittingly, that's where all the "occult" books were and where I spent most of my time)...I loved the card catalog and became an unofficial librarian for awhile (I was probably the only 12-year-old who could decipher the dewey decimal system). The public library here was recently "remodeled" with fluorescent lighting and TBH it looks more like a chain bookstore. I miss the soft-ish lighting and dark little corners libraries had when I was a pup.

[NotSoInnocent]

Ack! There are MORE of me!!!

I went to a Jewish preschool... for a whole 4 months. That's right. I was kicked out of a Jewish preschool . How did I manage that wondrous feat, you ask? Oh it was thrillingly easy:

I told the teacher that she skipped a word when she was reading "Goldilocks and the Three Bears". When she yelled at me in front of the rest of the kids that I "couldn't know that because [I'm] just a stupid little kid"... I yanked the book out of her hand and proceeded to read three pages before she yanked it back and sent me to the principal's office.

The principal beat my butt with a wooden paddle "for lying about being able to read" and then called my mother.

My darling mother (affectionately known as "Amazonian She-Bitch from HELL") ripped them both a new one after she sat me down in front of them and handed me that morning's newspaper to read to them.

I was almost 3 and was already waaaaaaaaay past the "Dick and Jane" books.

I got in trouble at school all the time for reading in class. However, I never made less than a B+ in any subject.

My lunches were spent in the school library and I used to skip boring high school classes to go to the library. The teachers finally stopped bothering asking where I went and would just call the school librarian to send me down if there was a test to take.

[gremcint]

Have you heard of something called "Interactive Math Program"? I was an unfortunate part of the pilot for that program here in my town, and their focus was on showing your work, even if the end answer was completely wrong (which most were).

Let me go through the list of my educational experiences.

MY first semester of highschool 2 my of my teachers were retiring and a third was brand new to the school.

I was in the first group of students to go through the new curriculim which mean four years in a row all fo the courses were new to the teachers.

at my first college I was in the last group to ever take their old diploma program (private school that only offered ac ouple programs) and the first to take their new degree.

At the college I just finished I am in the second last group to take my program before they stop offering it.

The head of my program retired this year the same year I graduated.

yeah my education has involved a lot of firsts and lasts.


Dresden files rock. I had a friend who had a meeting with her parents and the principle because she read too much. That was the whole meeting it wasn't about her reading in class or about her not doing work it was just about her reading too much. Her father was like: so what?