You must read, Alice, before it’s too late. You must fill your mind with the invented images of the past; the more the better. These images, apart from anything else, will help you put the two and twos of life together, and the more images your mind retains, the more wonderful will be the star-studded canopy of experience beneath which you, poor primitive creature that you are, will shelter; the nearer you will creep to the great blazing beacon of the Idea which animates us all.
- Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen

I read. I read a lot. I read while standing in line anywhere, while eating (unless I have someone to talk to, of course), any time my eyes aren’t required to do something else. I almost always have several books in progress and keep one in my purse and at least one backup in the car. I don’t read as many periodicals as I once did, but with blogs and such, I read more than ever!

I learned to read fairly early, thanks to my wonderful mother who read to me and my siblings (and my daughter!). After finding me puzzling over her old high school literature book at age 6, trying to make sense of Beowulf, 1 she began patiently carting me back and forth to the library at least once a week. She encouraged a love of the written word that drove me to improve my reading skills, and I credit any academic (or other) success to that skill more than any other. Katie and I spent a lot of time reading together when she was younger, until she became a confident reader on her own. She’s an avid reader now, and takes a book with her everywhere just as I do.

Since the written word is so important to me, it’s only reasonable that I have parts of my site dedicated to it. I enter new books that I read and books that I plan to read into Now Reading, a marvelous WordPress plug-in by Rob Miller. It creates a nice list of books that you can view or search. There are pages for each of the books on the list, and if I’ve written a review it’ll either be there or linked from that page. I’ve been trying to go back and add links to the authors’ web sites as much as possible. There’s usually a link to Amazon’s listing for the books, too.

We’ve listed most of the books (and music and movies) we own in a Readerware database. I just can’t recommend that software highly enough! It can export a nice list of the books, which I keep intending to upload here. If I were smarter, I’d figure out how to make it work with Now Reading, but I haven’t quite managed that yet. I’m sure it can export information in a form that sites like LibraryThing will accept, which is another project lurking in the back of my mind. (I have accounts there and at Shelfari and some other similar site, but I haven’t gotten around to making much use of them.)

  • Now Reading - what I’m reading now, what I’ve read recently (with some reviews, or at least ratings!), and the huge list of books that I’m planning to read. Some of that is spread over my other sites, so this one just has fiction, poetry, and non-technical/business non-fiction.
  • Sam’s Books! - My partner is an author, and this is a list of some of his published work.
  • Stuff to read - Books and authors. This will eventually get integrated with Now Reading.
  • I’m so fond of science fiction and fantasy that those books and authors needed their own section.
  • Books for children of all ages
  • Sites for readers - reviews, booksellers and so on. Soon to be updated to include podcasts!
  • Some of my own writing. These are mostly technical articles, chosen for my professional portfolio.

I used to write a lot of poetry and short stories, but most of that has been lost to time. If anyone out there has any fiction or poetry that I shared with you at some time, I’d really appreciate a copy.

There are a few authors who I love so much that I’ve made pages with samples of their poetry. I post pieces by other poets from time to time in my blog here. There are also a fair number of poetry posts in my LiveJournal that haven’t been posted here (yet).

Finally, these are some pieces I find inspirational.

1 What can I say? I was really bored during summer break between first and second grades. Unfortunately, my parents’ home contains very few books other than the Bible, children’s books, and (when I was little, at least) a couple of Mom’s old textbooks and an set of World Book encyclopedias from around 1960. The encyclopedias are long gone. They don’t even own bookshelves!

Tags: authors, Books, Poetry, Reading, reviews