Literary Blog Hop: Read This Before You Die and How Many Books at Once?

 

This week's Literary Blog Hop, sponsored by The Blue Bookcase, asks what work is it you must read before dying.  I spend most of my time recommending to other people what I think they should be reading--after all, it's my job as a bookseller to do that.  Not that I fancy myself a tastemaker or anything like that, but I do try to listen to every customer and synthesize their likes and dislikes to come up with the perfect book they should read.  Now I'm going to turn the tables on myself and make a recommendation to me.  Though I consider myself quite well read amidst English language literature, both classic and contemporary, I've read lamentably few works from other languages.  Therefore, I recommend to myself that I should read more so-called world literature, particularly the Russians, before I die.  I need to tackle Nabokov and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.  Round them off with a little Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn. Maybe learn if there are any Russian women of letters I should know aside from Anna Akhmatova, who is the only one I can think of!

Clearly NOT my photo!

This week's Book Blogger Hop, sponsored by Crazy For Books, asks whether we read more than one book at a time.  Frankly, I can't remember the last time I only had one book going, and I suppose that juggling 3-4 books is pretty typical.  I've got the book-of-the-moment, the one I cannot put down, that I read each night before falling asleep.  The book I read at the breakfast table each morning--usually a work of nonfiction that is easy to dip into and out of for brief intervals.  There's the, ahem, bathroom book.  And at least half of the time I've got an audio book going in my car or there's a fanfiction novel I'm reading online.  I own an e-reader (technically it belongs to the bookstore but nobody else ever seems to want it) but I find I like it best when I'm traveling, so I don't have an e-book constantly going unless I am also on the go.