The cat's new favorite spot. Can you see her?

Recently over on GoodReads, someone started a discussion on "How Did You Become a Reader?" and kicked it off with the following three questions, to which I have added a fourth:

1) Do you remember being read to as a child?
2) Do you remember when you first realized you love to read?
3) Have you always liked to read, or is it something you developed later?
4) What are some "firsts" in your life as a reader?

I had a lot of fun thinking about these questions and my own history as a reader, and since so many of us here on LJ are avid readers, I thought I'd share with y'all. I'd love to hear your answers as well (if you answer over on your own LJ, leave a comment here and let me know so I can find it!).

I don't remember ever not being a reader. Mom was an English teacher and librarian so there were always books at our house. We went to the library A LOT and I was always allowed to take as many books as I wanted. (Our first trip to a bookstore was quite traumatic, apparently, as I did not like being limited to only two!).

Mom read to me, and later to me and my brother, until I was in my teens -- he was five years younger than me so it was quite a challenge finding something that suited both of us! I remember The Hobbit, The Paleface Redskins, Half Magic, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle...

Sometimes Mom would insist that I go outside and get some fresh air...so of course I would go outside with a book. My favorite thing to do was take a bag of apples and two books and climb a tree. I would sit in the tree happily reading for easily a couple of hours.

My parents divorced when I was really young, like about two, so for years I would go spend two weeks with my dad every summer. My stepmom had three kids when they got married; I was a pretty shy kid and they didn't like me much, or I thought they didn't, though more likely it was just that we didn't have much in common because...THEY DIDN'T LIKE TO READ (gasp). So every summer I took two suitcases, one full of clothes and one full of books. One year I didn't bring enough and had to read some of them twice.

The only time I remember mom taking a book away from me was when I was ten or eleven and I got my hands on her copy of The Godfather. Probably a good idea, I think it's a bit much for a ten-year-old. Although the best thing about books is that, unlike movies, if a kid runs into something they aren't ready for, they probably simply won't understand it or be able to picture it, so it just goes right past them.

The first book I actually remember reading was Lloyd Alexander's The High King. The first book I remember getting as a gift is Bambi, when I was about seven. The first book I remember eagerly awaiting publication of is Silver On the Tree -- I'd recently discovered the series and had zoomed through them, and was horrified to discover I would have to actually wait for the last one. I think that was my first introduction to the idea that books weren't some kind of natural resource -- they didn't grow on shelves like apples grow on trees, but had to be made -- written by a real live human being and then printed and bound and shipped and so on. (The logical corollary, which I arrived at almost immediately, was People Write Books + I Am A People = Therefore I Could Write A Book. I haven't yet, but I haven't given up on it either.) The first nonfiction book I remember reading is Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man, about her research with chimpanzees in the wild. The first book that actually changed how I thought about life was Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Growing up, I never went anywhere without a book, even if we were just running to the grocery store or the gas station. This is still true today; just as some people won't leave the house without putting on their makeup, I feel undressed if I leave the house without a book. They have been and continue to be the best of teachers and friends.

The little icons that go with each warning are HILARIOUS. I think my favorite is "excessive use of passive voice" XD

There is a meme circulating: put the letters of the alphabet into your search window and write down the first auto-complete for each. Other people get all kinds of interesting things (shyfoxling got "dg33fb led connectors" for D and "skankin' pickle" for S, which I don't know what it is but it makes me giggle). When I do it I get precisely what you'd predict if I were, say, George F. Babbitt: A = amazon, B = best buy, and so on down to Y = youtube and Z = zillow.

What does this mean? Why is my browser so conventional, so dull, so uninteresting? Let the record show that I have never searched for zillow in my life, and really who needs to google Amazon when you can just type in "amazon.com"?

I did notice today that if I type "what is" into google, the first autocomplete is "what is a caucus". No surprise there; it's a very unfamiliar concept to most Americans, even if you have had it explained to you as a child by a Dodo.

Edit: Ah, I believe I have sussed it out. It's because I do private browsing and clear my cache every time I close my browser. This means my search history never gets stored, so all google has to offer me is the most popular search for a given letter.

So my browser isn't boring, I'm just very very secretive :)

Rereading Gone With the Wind for about the thirteenth time and loving it, as always. However, for the first time I really noticed some of the ages mentioned, and was a bit taken aback. Gerald O'Hara is 43 when he marries Ellen Robillard, who is only 15. Suellen O'Hara's "beau" Frank Kennedy is 40 and she's 14. And Rhett Butler is mentioned as being 30 or 35 at the beginning of the novel and Scarlett is only 16.

For some reason this never struck me before, but even for the 1860s this seems rather a wide age disparity.

Take the day off from work and read "DM of the Rings," a very funny comic in which a long-suffering dungeon master tries to persuade Dave -- I mean Frodo -- and eight other players to stay in character as he leads them through a lengthy adventure in a strange new place called Middle Earth. I have been giggling away for an hour straight and we're not even through Moria yet. If you have ever been a DM/GM (*koff*tcpip*koff*), you'll find the creator's comments underneath each episode funny as hell, too -- I was particularly amused by those for Episode XIII.

"Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign..."

Episode I: The Copious Backstory ==>

THANK YOU to everyone :) for the warm birthday wishes and virtual gifts, and to the wonderful rivertempest for the real gift of Snape's wand (yes! Snape's wand!!!) -- it is a thing of beauty and I shall cherish it.

Also, my mom sent me this. She knows me well lol.

"There is so much that is matchless to remember about Alan Rickman. ..." ==> Ian McKellen's tribute to Alan

The New Yorker special cartoon tribute

"...His sensational breakthrough came in 1986 as Valmont, the mordant seducer in Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He was nominated for a Tony for the part; Lindsay Duncan memorably said of her co-star’s sonorous performance that audiences would leave the theatre wanting to have sex “and preferably with Alan Rickman”. ==> The Guardian

I would have killed to see him as Valmont. Just imagine!

Reveals are up over at mini_fest and happy_trekmas, so the last of the four fics I wrote for December fests can now be unveiled! (I know, I know, you've all been waiting, haven't you??)

nursedarry, whose fault it is that I'm here on LJ at all (smooches her), persuaded me to write for happy_trekmas this year. I wrote "Walk Beside Me", a series of missing scenes (all canon-compliant, natch!) that show the growth of the friendship between James T. Kirk and Spock. You can read it on the fest's LJ site or over on AO3. Rating is G, word count is 4156, and it's TOS all the way, no rebootin' AU here, nosiree bub.

For mini_fest this year I tried a pairing I've never done before (Severus and Petunia) and wrote a story called "A Part of Yesterday." One commenter was kind enough to say that "you made me like the horrid Petunia" :) It's angsty, of course, and bittersweet, but I enjoyed writing it very much since it was something I'd never done before, and I'm pleased with the way it came out. You can read it on the fest's LJ site or over on AO3. Rating is Teen/PG-13, word count is 6651, and it's entirely canon-compliant, so don't expect a happy ending.

(I've also now got my hoggywartyxmas spoof of "The Night Before Christmas" posted on AO3.)

Reveals are up over at hoggywartyxmas so I can now own up to being the author of The Spoof is in the Pudding, a wizardy riff on "The Night Before Christmas, in which Hagrid and Flitwick eat too much fruitcake with surprising results while Severus and Minerva exeunt, pursued by a waltz.

I was thrilled that my poem was one of the opening day posts for the fest, and I have been truly overwhelmed by the number of positive comments that my little rhyme received. In particular, my recipient mmadfan said that the poem brightened her day twice when she was feeling under the weather. I cannot imagine a higher compliment :)

hoggywartyxmas always has superlative offerings, and the writers and artists this year really outdid themselves. Thanks to the mods for running it yet again, and I am already looking forward to next year!