My Dirty Little (Bookish) Secrets

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So here's the thing - I don't think I have EVER lied about having read or not having read a book.  I'm ashamed of nothing that I've read, and I relish the bad ones (ok, the really bad ones) as much as I do the really good ones, because it gives me an opportunity to write SCATHING reviews, something I LOVE to do.  So, instead of revealing books I've lied about, I'll reveal some "dirty" little bookish secrets instead.  Here goes...

My Dirty Little (Bookish) Secrets

1.  I liked the first third of Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert - I mean, who doesn't like food??  However, I couldn't get past that because she was such a self-absorbed whiner.  She thought she was uber-enlightened, and I thought she was...well...uber-snotty.  It was "me, me, me, me, me, and more me" - BLECH!

2.  Though I have read Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice (and really liked them at the time), the idea of vampires (now) makes me sort of vomit a little in my mouth.  I know they're really popular right now (Twilight insanity), but they just really gross me out.

3.  I read a lot of romance novels in my teenage years - both Harlequin and others (more racy).  I'm not ashamed! :-)

4.  I hated, loathed, and despised the following classics (gasp!!):  Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The Love Songs of Sappho, and various Greek & Roman literature.  Not my cup of tea at all.

5.  I have loved Stephen King since I discovered him as an adolescent, and I was therefore shocked (and disappointed) that I had such a viscerally negative reaction to The Gunslinger (first book of The Dark Tower series), especially considering that I read it first as a college student and loved it.  It further disappoints me because I had fully intended to reread the first three books and finish the series, and had purchased all of the books (USED) toward that end. :-(

6.  I admit it, bodily functions are hilarious.  And books about bodily functions are usually so, unless (UNLESS) they cross the line into the purely gross.  Farts, for example = hilarious!  Nasty (and I mean disgusting) names for...well...you know = purely gross.  You get the idea.

7.  I have never read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Middlemarch by George Elliot, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, or Animal Farm & 1984 by George Orwell.  I fully plan to do so before I die.

8.  I have never read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings Series by J.R.R. Tolkien.  Nor have I read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.  I am completely ok with the fact that I may or may not get to them during my life.

9,  I have never read On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, anything by Marquis de Sade, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, anything by Agatha Christie, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, and probably quite a number of other seminal works, and I can say with some certainty that it is unlikely I will ever do so.

10.  I will never read The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister to my son.  I want him to be the best HIM that he can be, and there no way I'm getting him hooked on a book that frowns on individualism.  

11.  I will never (again) read Love You Forever by Robert Munsch to my son, because it I found it completely creepy and disturbing that a mom would hang on so tight to her son that she would continue to sneak into his room and rock him while he slept...as a teen, as an adult, as a married man.  Ewwwwww!!!