Bookish Miscellany

This week, Booking Through Thursday asks, How do you feel about illustrations in your books? Graphs? Photos? Sketches? I can't say that I always spend a lot of time looking at them, but I like them. They just add a little extra something. I loved the illustrations China Miéville did for his own book, Un Lun Dun. They added just the perfect touch of whimsy to an already-charming story. And it was a lot of fun to see exactly what he had in mind when he described binjas! How do you feel about any kinds of graphics in your books?

In honor of National Grammar Day … it IS “March Fourth” after all … do you have any grammar books? Punctuation? Writing guidelines? Style books? More importantly, have you read them? How do you feel about grammar in general? Important? Vital? Unnecessary? Fussy? Bad grammar drives me crazy.  I can see my family bracing for a diatribe now.  :-)  Grammar is very important.  It helps to ensure that what I'm trying to write is what you're reading.  Little things make a big difference sometimes.  Some grammar rules get a little too fussy though, and can obscure more than they clarify, like when you try to rewrite a sentence so that it doesn't end in a dangling preposition.  "For which it was intended" is just more awkward than "It was intended for," grammar be damned.  That's all I'll say about that though, mainly because I'm afraid that someone will come along and say, "It's funny you should say that, because I've noticed that you consistently make this grammatical error...."  My spoken grammar is a whole different story.  Can I just say that I'm a Southerner and leave it at that?  I might know better, but that doesn't stop me from pulling out, "I ain't got no" on occasion. I own a Chicago Manual of Style, but I don't actually pull it out too frequently.  It's too easy to just Google whatever I'm not sure about.  I've read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but thought it was pretty basic and I didn't really find the snarky humor all that funny. How do you feel about grammar?

How can you encourage a non-reading child to read? What about a teen-ager? Would you require books to be read in the hopes that they would enjoy them once they got into them, or offer incentives, or just suggest interesting books? If you do offer incentives and suggestions and that doesn’t work, would you then require a certain amount of reading? At what point do you just accept that your child is a non-reader? In the book Gifted Hands by brilliant surgeon Ben Carson, one of the things that turned his life around was his mother’s requirement that he and his brother read books and write book reports for her. That approach worked with him, but I have been afraid to try it. My children don’t need to “turn their lives around,” but they would gain so much from reading and I think they would enjoy it so much if they would just stop telling themselves, “I just don’t like to read.” Well, I don't have kids and I've always been a reader, so I don't have any practical advice to offer on this. I think every person is different though. I'm far too stubborn to respond to required book reports. In fact, I hated almost everything I had to read for school. And I think that offering rewards would make reading seem like a chore. Those types of things obviously work for some people though. My husband wasn't really a reader when we met. He'd read a few books by Robin Cook and enjoyed them, but he never made time for reading. I went out on a limb and bought him The Alienist by Caleb Carr. He loved it! He's still not a voracious reader, but he always has one book on his nightstand that he's working on. For…

Booking Through Thursday asks: The northern hemisphere, at least, is socked in by winter right now… So, on a cold, wintry day, when you want nothing more than to curl up with a good book on the couch … what kind of reading do you want to do? Honestly, I'm not aware of my reading habits changing throughout the year. When I think of winter though, I think of classics and/or big, heavy books, like the one I'm reading now, World Without End by Ken Follett.  It just seems like I have the time and attention to devote to them, instead of being busy doing outdoorsy kind of stuff in the warmer months. What kind of books do you read in the winter?