Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Facts

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. 

This week's theme asked us to come up with a list of facts about us to share with everyone. We decided to keep them all book-related!

I had someone at work  introduce me to world of reading. Twilight actually, the movie. She told me to watch "a movie called Twilight" (of course I was not into the world of reading, so I had no idea it was from a book). She said that it was about vampires and all that supernatural stuff. I said OK I will watch it. So I did, and I got obsessed with it so much that I wanted more! So my husband, for the following weeks at the Union Station in DC, bought me the rest of the books. One book a week. I never asked him to buy them for me, he just did until I was done with the Twilight series! And after that, all I wanted and I want to do is reading. Now my poor husband does not buy me books anymore, he just begs me to stop buying them.

Twilight was my first book that introduce me to reading, I love the Twilight Movie also, is my favorite, with New Moon. 

 I am an Argentinian living in the USA,  and as such I speak two languages: Spanish and English.
 So as I say above , Twilight was my first book. and my dear husband bought me all the books in Spanish. Which was OK with me, reading in my own language I can read faster. But I don't really like to read in Spanish.

 It is not the same feeling,  reading in Spanish as it is to read in English. Something always get lost in translation and the meaning it isn't the same. I could read the same paragraph in English and Spanish and will always sound better and make more sense in English.

Now I would have no problem in reading a book in Spanish if it was actually written in Spanish.

 This will sound weird, but I like to sit in my kitchen to read.  This way I can concentrate more. If I sit in the living room, I will probably fall sleep in the couch while reading or I will end up watching Nexflix.

Also, I need to listen to music when I read. I have to or I feel like I am missing something.
When a book is really good I walk around in the kitchen playing with my hair hahaha.

 We met online in some facebook bookclub. Then we made our own secret bookclub, with only a few members. We've known each other for 7 years. We met in TX for the first time a few years back! We spent a few days together at her house, and then we went to a big book signing! I also got to meet another dear friend Betsy and the Lovely Danielle!

Then Allyson came to visit me last year! I love this girl!

As with a lot of the finer (and nerdier) points of my personality, Holly is to blame for my book addiction. She was my brother's high school girlfriend, and she brought over a giant sack of books to our house one day. Being the nosy brat that I was, I started going through the bag and picking out things that sounded interesting. Then, Holly had to go and bring me the first book in the Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce, and I was hooked from then on. 16 years later, we don't read much of the same stuff anymore, but it is still fun to talk to her about whatever we are reading. 

 

I know we have both touched on this before, and there is even a little bit about it in our about us section. But JUB didn't start out as a blog. Heck, it didn't even start out as JUB. Mariela and I were both members of a book club on facebook. The moderator there was awful, and we migrated to a different book club. Then the moderator there became awful, imposing all of these rules that we didn't agree with. So we decided to create our own group, where it would just be a small number of people who could do whatever the hell they wanted. And thus JUB was created. Fast forward a few years, and Mariela and I decided we wanted to have our own blog, thus JUBB was formed.

We have a lot of fun on here, and on the facebook page. Most of the stuff we interact over anymore has very little to do with books. Mariela and the other girls at JUBB are all so special to me. I can't imagine a life without them! I have gotten to meet a good majority of them in real life, but there are still more of them that I hope to meet someday! Plus, I can't wait til the next time I get to see Mariela again :)

It's actually probably been more than 4 years, but going over 4 makes me too sad. I have been in the world's worst book slump. Really, I blame it on Kdramas. Ever since I have found them, my time is just unfairly divided. I used to be able to knock out around 200 books a year. Now I am lucky if I hit 20. Every book I start, I barely make it a few pages before I give up. 

I feel bad for my books. I have missed them, but not enough :p 

 When not in the midst of a ridiculous slump, I really love YA and Adult Fantasy. I own roughly 3,000 books, and probably 2,000 of them fit into that genre. The other third of them are divided up between Adult Contemporary Romance, Mystery/Thrillers, and a couple of science fiction and horror tossed in for good measure. My favorite genre of late has been YA Dystopia. It makes me wonder why the Adult romance market hasn't gotten into the dystopia trend. 

I can admit, I am probably one of the pickiest people you will ever have the displeasure of trying to recommend something to. It's ridiculous. I have dropped books from the first sentence, because something about it pissed me off. I have bought whole series that I will then never read because I found out a detail that I don't like. I have put dramas on hold for months because I saw in an episode preview one tiny little thing that I didn't want to deal with, so I stopped. In order for me to love something, it has to be this huge confluence of event that doesn't happen all that often. 

The downside is, people always tell me they don't like recommending things to me. The upside is that those same people also say that they don't worry about liking something if I recommend it, because if I am raving about it, it must be good. Which is literally the only upside to being picky!

So genres I won't read are pretty vast. I have to be in a very specific mood to read Science Fiction. I will buy, but hardly ever read, horror. Oft-times it's words or ideas that keep from reading. Such as, step-sibling romances or books about time travel. Or faeries. Mention anything having to do with Faeries and I am out of there so fast. It takes A LOT to get me to read about vampires anymore. I like Greek Mythology, but a lot of the time it is a huge turn off for me when it comes to YA fiction. 

I feel like this one is probably true for a lot of bloggers and readers. But I really, really love words. I live in awe of them. There is nothing so simple in the world that can cause as much happiness or as much devastation as a couple of words can. They hold so much power! And are open to such interpretation. The same sentence can hold different meaning depending on the audience, and that to me is pretty impressive. I love alliteration. I love the thesaurus. I love that no matter how many books you read, there will always be new words to come across and learn. I love that there are words in other languages that have no direct English word. I love the Korean word 만세 (manse) for hooray. I hear it in a song, and I instantly love the song. I really love words.