Tribute to an Outstanding Blog: Booksplease

March 23, 2008 at 1:45 pm (Blogroll of honor, books)

Booksplease is one of my favorite blogs. Margaret, the blogger, is passionate about books in a way that I completely recognize and understand. She write beautifully about books and authors and always makes me want to rush right out and get what she’s been reading. This post on the essays of Virginia Woolf is a good example.

Margaret recently posed the question: What do you do when you finish a book? Do you “dive right into the next one” or give yourself time to think about and reflect on the one you’ve just finished? Do you switch gears and do something else altogether? I really like this question. It made me consider my reading habits as a whole. And at once I came up with the precise adjective to describe them: frantic! To begin with, I’m always reading several books simultaneously. It’s a habit I acquired when I went to work at the library twenty-six years ago. I told myself I would stop doing this when I retired, but, well, I’m still doing it. Reading more than one volume at the same time saves me from that dreaded crisis moment compulsive readers face when they finish a book…Now what??!!

For example: last night I finished The Chameleon’s Shadow by Minette Walters. Since I was already on page 52 of Cleaver by Tim Parks, I went right to it. I also have in reserve – I always like to have a nonfiction title “on the go” – A Land So Strange by Andres Resendez. This book is subtitled, “The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca: The Extraordinary Tale of a Shipwrecked Spaniard Who Walked Across America in the Sixteenth Century.” Where, I wonder, has this amazing story been all my life?

Here’s Margaret’s post on the subject of the passionate reader’s dilemma.