Miembromaryanne

I started book collecting in my early twenties--or, rather, books just seemed to follow me home and stay, like stray dogs with big brown eyes, making room for themselves on a book stack on the floor, a crowded coffee table or a book shelf (if they could find one!). Twenty years later, a move from house to apartment meant severe pruning, a grievous task. My "library" is now pretty small--a few hundred books--but we've gone through a lot together, and each title has a memory attached to it.My books are undisciplined (shaggy tales) but democratic: Faulkner sits next to L.M. Montgomery (both immersed in place and identity), Tolkien converses with Dan Brown (both fantasy writers); Thackeray chats with Margaret Mitchell (Becky Sharp meets Scarlett O' Hara), and Rider Haggard trades adventures with Harry Potter. What a wonderful bunch!

A copy-editor by trade and inclination, I love books and language. My mother once said I was slow to learn how to read in Grade 1 but the next year picked it up quickly and never looked back. She was the main reason I turned into a lifelong reader, because there were always books and magazines around the house. And of course, the public library, my prime source for books. One of my interests is children's literature, both the stories themselves and scholarly works about them; also, English and European history, the U.S. Civil War, popular biology, religion and spirituality, 19th century English literature and criticism, biography, international, British and U.S. film and theatre history, and cookbooks.