Oliver All Over

My friend Marie has started a new blog called The Shore Bookworm.  Here is the meme about books, and I will answer it on behalf of the whole family:

1. To mark your page you: use a bookmark, bend the page corner, leave the book open face down?   Kevin uses dogears a lot, so I do, too, when we are reading the same book.  For hardcovers,  I use the dust jacket flap as a bookmark.  Oliver reads books that you finish in one sitting, so he doesn’t use bookmarks, but he does love to collect them!

2. Do you lend your books?  We usually give books away, or trade them.  We’ve made a promise to ourselves not to accumulate  books, so we only keep the very special ones.

3. You find an interesting passage: you write in your book or NO WRITING IN BOOKS!   Usually, no writing, but Oliver has been known to color ina book.  Not so much now that he can read.

4. Dust jackets – leave it on or take it off?   Oliver and Kevin get rid of them as soon as they open the book.  I try to save them before they get stepped on, because some of the kids books have great art.

5. Hard cover, paperback, skip it and get the audio book?   We like to wait for paperback if we can.  Audio books are great on roadtrips, and for falling asleep, but only unabridged ones.  I love iTunes!

6. Do you shelve your books by subject, author, or size and color of the book spines? Before Kevin:  by subject, and then alphabetically by author within subject.  Fiction all by author.  (I used to work in a library – I’m lucky I don’t use the Dewey decimal system.)  After Kevin:  Which ever book you just read goes i the open spot on the shelf.

7. Buy it or borrow it from the library later?   Our procrastination makes library books very expensive.

8. Do you put your name on your books – scribble your name in the cover, fancy bookplate, or stamp?   We both have books from our childhood, in which we proudly wrote our names.  Now, we don’t bother.  But I do still have the book stamp my parents gave me for Christmas one year that crimps the paper like a corporate seal. So cool, I was thrilled.  except for my name being spelled wrong.  So I don’t use it.

9. Most of the books you own are rare and out of print books or recent publications?   The only way we have stumbled into a rare out of print book is if we owned it when it was new, and now it’s out of print.  All the value in our books is in the words, not the pages.

10. Page edges – deckled or straight? Straight!
11. How many books do you read at one time? Usually one novel at a time, but several non-fiction.  Oliver has one “bedtime reading” chapter book that we read to him, and any number of books he reads each day, one after the other.

12. Be honest, ever tear a page from a book?  Never.  (’Cept for Oliver, but that doesn’t count, he was just excited about the fox and the box and the house and the mouse)

Please let us know your answers.