Today’s TTT is Bookish Brags and/or Confessions. But first, the tease!
“Imagine it — to be the King-Emperor of nearly five hundred million subjects and to be able to locate the twelve dullest, then gather them together around one table. It takes a special kind of genius.”
“The government seems to be very popular. You’d think we’d already won.”
“I don’t much care for it,” said the Prime Minister. “It reminds me of Walpole’s remark before the war with Spain. ‘Today they are ringing the bells; soon they will be wringing their hands.'” (Precipice, Robert Harris)
So….bookish brags and confessions. I’m going to kick off with a brag and alternate!
(1) I have read War and Peace, and in my review I posted “Bragging rights for life”.
(2) It took me three attempts to finish Catch-22 and that was with partial help from some CliffNotes-like web resource.
(3) I read The Glory and the Dream, a 1400 page social history of America in the 20th century, in middle school. I suspect I was the only kid in the history of the school to do it!
(4) The version of Hunchback of Notre Dame I read from in my library turned out to be abridged. I’ll have to do the full thing at some point, maybe if I get in a French mood. Rewatching Mon Oncle may do the trick. (Click to listen to its delightful, ear-wormy soundtrack.)
(5) In 2007, I read the entire Harry Potter series through for the first time in about a month: the back half of August and the first week of September, specifically, being delayed slightly by Deathly Hallows still being a waiting-list book.
(6) In the 2012 Bookish Confessions top ten Tuesday post (holy cow, we’ve been doing this for a while), I said:
.Although I’m hostile toward digital readers, I’ll probably wind up buying one within the next five years. My rising Luddite tendencies notwithstanding, my job as a reference assistant often entails helping people with computers, and increasingly their own wireless devices. If touch-screen interfaces are the way of the future, I need to learn to navigate them to function out in the world. Of course, at home I can be as tech-free as I want.
In February 2016, responding to an essay I’d written critical e-readers called “Go Go Gadget Literature?“, I sheepishly admitted to having bought a Kindle in 2015 at some point. Today ebooks generally claim about half of my reading, though I haven’t used my actual Kindle in years. The Kindle app on my phone & the Kindle Cloud Reader are my main e-reading sources. And be it noted, I’m not quite ‘tech-free’ at home: for the last few years I’ve used a Google Nest Hub as a virtual photoframe and an object I can demand the time from in the middle of the night. (I use British Racing Green as my Google voice. I like having a posh personal assistant, even if she’s hopeless with Spanish place names like “Valley Grand-dey”). 2012 me also knew which way the wind was blowing: I’m absolutely fluent in both ioS and Android.
(7) My highest-bookcount year remains 218 in 2009. Looking at the list, it’s easy to see why: lots of fiction, as that was the year I discovered Greg Iles, Steven Saylor, and Robert Harris — not to mention plowed through the entire Series of Unfortunate Events. I was also obsessed with religion and philosophy that year, reading books on Buddhism, neopaganism, Christianity, and Stoicism.
(8) I once had an entire bookcase devoted to nothing but Isaac Asimov (five shelves!) but in time have reduced it to two shelves. Most of the discards were science essay collections I’d knew I never re-read — or read, seeing as some of them I’d procured in lots from eBay and were hopelessly outdated.
And because I don’t resist puns, here are our last bookish Braggs and Confessions.
Reading Freely 
Wow, reading all the HP books in a month!! I am currently re-reading the series but my goal was to read them all in a year, haha.
It was my first exposure to them and I’d quit my job to get ready to move to college, so I had plenty of time!
I’ve never been able to get through Catch-22. Someday I will try again, though.
And 218 books read in a year is impressive. I think my record is a little over 100.
Thanks for stopping by earlier.
Lydia
wow 5 books cases with Asimov! And thanks for the great pun.
With you, the pun always rises…
https://wordsandpeace.com/2024/10/08/my-top-10-bookish-happy-highlights/
I loved reading this list! Interesting brags and confessions 😄 If I ever read my copy of War and Peace, I would fully claim those lifetime bragging rights too! 😂
the full version of Hunchback is full of architecture and boring to tears 😂 I don’t think you’re missing much! Happy TTT (Athena @ OneReadingNurse)
I’d agree – reading War and Peace definitely gives you bragging rights for life! Yes, Mon Oncle has a great soundtrack. 😊
War and Peace is one I’d love to get to eventually. Totally deserved bragging rights for life for reading it! I’m also interested in reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame, eventually!
Haze
https://thebookhaze.com/
WOW, you have some very impressive bookish accomplishments under your belt!
I was also super resistant to e-reading back in the day, but when publishers starting moving toward sending e-ARCs more than physical ones, I knew I had to get on the e-reading bandwagon. Now, I love my Kindle Fire and use it often. Funny how we change over time, isn’t it?
Happy TTT!
Susan
http://www.blogginboutbooks.com
War and Peace is way too long for my page limit. It took me about a month to read each Harry Potter book! I held out on ebooks for the longest time as well but now I use that more than anything.
Fabulous confessions! I especially love your last one…
I read War and Peace too, but I read it back during the internet’s infancy and before Goodreads existed, so I have no review to reference. Definitely bragging rights for life! I hope you have a fabulous week.
Here’s my TTT if you wish to visit – https://justanothergirlandherbooks.blogspot.com/2024/10/top-ten-tuesday-bookish-brags-and.html
Thank you! Enjoyed your post as well.
Love how you alternated. I wish I would have thought about long books I’ve read to include as brags! Those are quite the accomplishments.
I have yet to finish Catch-22. I read it in senior English class in high school but never read the last chapter out of spite. 😂😂
And I too was very against ebooks at first, but I read a lot of books digitally these days (mainly arcs but also for new indie authors that I don’t know if I want the physical copy of until I’ve read it but aren’t available through the library). And I’m also a reference specialist at a library so I help tons of people with their ereaders too!
Haha, reading the whole of War and Peace is for sure something to brag about it. I read it partly because my dad bet me I couldn’t finish it by an arbitrary deadline he gave me (I did, because that’s how I roll; probably he knew that, too, and just wanted to provoke me to spending time with it).
Since you were an Asimov fan, did you ever read The Positronic Man? Not the short story collection, but the full novel? I think Silverberg was involved as well. Man, I got so obsessed with that, but few people ever seem to have read it, just the short story.
Postrionic Man was the first Asimov fiction book I ever read, because I thought it was what the movie Bicentennial Man was based on. (Turns out the movie was based off of a short story of the same name.) That was 23+ years ago, though! All I remember is scenes on the Moon that made me realize “Yep, this is definitely not the Robin Williams story”.
Wow 218 books in a year is amazing. It’s interesting to hear that you were against digital reading initially but it now makes up around half of what you read. I love how portable it is, that you can change text size, get books in seconds & they have a built in light. But there’s something special about holding a book in your hands too. Well done for reading War & Peace too. I want to try and read more classics sometime but that’s one of the ones I kind of doubt I’ll get to.
I finished Catch 22, but I remember feeling like it really dragged a bit in the middle.
Also, I actually really like my kindle… but I’d probably never have switched over to it we could afford the kind shelf space Beautiful Wife and I aspire to.
I read lots of e-books, to get new books free, but not for enjoyment so much as just to know which to rave over and possibly sell. For pleasure I read printed books. If I really liked an e-book, I make a samizdat copy.
PK