Monday 9 April 2012

Types of books


Uploaded by nat_mach on November 5, 2011
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It has come to my attention that there are many types of books in the world...
  • Bath books: 1st you have to not care about their condition in case they go for a swim; 2nd ideally they should be 'bite-sized' books otherwise you end up losing track of time and getting very wrinkly. Good examples are those fascinating fact type books.
  • Coffee table books: these are the sort of books you buy on a whim; usually paying too much... high on image and looking good; low on actual content. They end up on a lonely shelf gathering dust and never really pay for themselves.
  • Books you love: for whatever reason; a good time of your life, the way they made you feel... you keep them and come back to them again and again. I have a few. 'My Family and Other Animals' by Gerald Durrell; as a youngster I had a horror of staying away for home and would avoid it whenever possible. When not possible I'd take this book with me. My original copy has long since disintegrated but the book still holds a special place in my heart. 'Dragon Prince' by Melanie Rawn (and the series); I had a summer job which involved a lengthy period of doing not very much waiting for dishwashers and things; I sat up in the attic kitchen and was taken to a different magical world. 'Gone with the Wind' by Margaret Mitchell; first read (preciously) when I was 9 or 10 - enchanted by the world that was 'gone with the wind'. The first copy I read was a hard back and the spine eventually fell off to be replaced with brown parcel tape (elegant). My current copy I bought cheaply in New York and used to read in queues for tourist attractions!
  • Books you hate: for me these are almost exclusively books I was forced to read as part of a literature study at school. My taste seemed to rarely coincide with that of the exam board. I also don't like reading 'to order' and a few books have later read and forgiven; some were so good that they never made it to the 'hate list'; my list includes (in no particular order) - Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice', George Orwell's 'Animal Farm', Albert Camus's 'La Peste' and Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. Irrational; many people have good things to say about these books, but I have taken against them.
  • Kids books: the favourites from our childhoods... we've all got them! Mine was 'The Nickle Nackle Tree' by Linley Dodd. My original copy was somewhere in my mother's lost and a replacement was not to be found. I eventually bought a dog-eared second-hand copy on eBay. Then suddenly all the kids from 1975 grew up and wanted the book for their own kids - it went from being out of print to freely available on Amazon. Every child I know gets given a copy... just for the pictures, I can still recite the story by heart!