>Supah’s Book Club

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It’s Monday again, and this week’s theme is one of my favorite topics – books!  I am supposed to imagine I’m being interviewed by Oprah Supah about my book-reading life.  Here goes!

What are you currently reading?
Just finished rereading A Wrinkle in Time for my Newbery project.  Before that I read all of the Twilight books over vacation.  Great fun.

When do you find the time to read?
I try to read a chapter or two before I go to bed, but most of my reading is done when I have middle of the night insomnia. On vacation when grandparents can keep an eye on the munchkin is the best time, though!

Where do you do most of your reading?

I do most of my reading in bed, whether mine or the guest room’s if I’m up at 3 a.m.

How do you choose what you read?
Right now I am trying to read all of the Newbery books (and blogging about it here), which are the best of children’s literature each year, so that gives me an easy list to choose from.  Occasionally I follow a recommendation from a friend, but mostly I tend to (gasp) judge a book by its cover.  I have rarely gone wrong with this technique, to be honest.  Someone once asked me:  glossy or matte.  Almost always the answer is matte.  That’s where I start.  The rest is intuition.

From where do you get most of your books?
There was a time in my life when I went to the library every week (namely when I lived in Brooklyn and commuted for an hour on the subway to Manhattan to teach every day), but now I tend to get most of my books from the bookstore even though I know I should still be borrowing them.  Knowing I should not be spending so much money on books is why I have not yet bought a Nook or a Kindle; too easy to just buy one from anywhere!  If the libraries would get on board so I could download one to borrow, now, that would be bliss.

What do you do with a book after you’ve finished reading it?
If I loved it, it goes onto the bookshelf to be reread when I’m sick, tired, or nostalgic.  If I liked it, I try to loan it out.  If I hated it, it goes to Half-Price Books.

What are your book (reading) quirks?
I’d say my only quirk is that I like to use books as Chore Books.  I pick an old favorite that has chapters I can finish in 10-15 minutes, complete a chore, then read a chapter.  Clean, read, repeat until chores are done.  I am not one of those people who can work for hours and hours straight; I have to have a break or I burn out by lunchtime.  Taking scheduled breaks to read a book I love like the Harry Potter series helps me keep going all day at whatever the task is.  I can’t pick a new book because eventually I will give up cleaning to keep reading and find out what happens next.

Perhaps that’s my only other book-reading quirk:  when I’m into a book, I am one of those people who will stay up half the night to get to a “good stopping point” as I say to my students.  When I was reading the Twilight series over vacation, my average bedtime was 3 a.m.!  By the way, those books are better than you think they’ll be.  As I just told a friend, 13-year old fangirls tend to be idiotic; the books themselves are entertaining.  And I’ve decided that not reading a book just because it’s popular is just as stupid as reading it only for that reason.  Ok, the covers are glossy and unimpressive, but nobody’s perfect.

That’s about it for me.  Head over to visit MommyBrain or Supah to read more interviews!