This week’s Booking Through Thursday prompt:

Is there a book that you wish you could “unread”? One that  you disliked so thoroughly you wish you could just forget that you ever read it?

Most of the time, if I hate a book, I stop reading it well before the end. However, there have been a few books I really couldn’t stand and I had to read them, for work or school or something of the sort. Recently, I tried to read two literary classics that I hadn’t ever gotten around to before, and I ended up getting through them and didn’t like either one by the time I was finished. Though I didn’t HATE them with a large amount of rage, I also didn’t like them and determined that I would probably never teach them if I could help it. Those two books were …

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

and

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

(Ok, that last picture is the dvd cover, but you get the point.)

What book would you love to be able to read again for the first time?

I don’t know if I will be able to choose just one for this one.  I would love to be able to read the Harry Potter series again for the first time.  Ditto with the Sookie Stackhouse series and possibly even the Twilight series. 

I would also like to see my kids experience a book over again for the first time.  Two such books come to mind immediately. 

I got this picture from amazon.com.

The first is Walter the Farting Dog.  The first time I read this book to my kids, I had purchased the book and a plush “Walter” puppy at the book store.  The plush dog made farting nosies, so I hid him under my shirt and squeezed it when we got to those parts in the book.  The reaction from my children was both priceless and hilarious, but it’s the kind of thing you can only get once.

What a great book!

The second book is The Monster at the End of This Book, starring loveable, furry old Grover.  When I read this book to my kids, I use my Grover voice, which wins big brownie points.  Daddy just doesn’t read it like Mommy does, unfortunately for him (or maybe, unfortunately for me).  So anyhoo, the first time I read this book to my kids, in the monster voice, they LOVED it.  They still love it, just not in that same, new-experience kind of a way.  So it would be cool to get to watch them turn the pages and delight in Grover’s exasperation for the firs time all over again.

Though it would be great to read all of these books for the first time again, at least I can re-read them with the seasoned eyes of a veteran fan, and love them all the same.

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday prompt:

Book Gluttony! Are your eyes bigger than your book belly? Do you have a habit of buying up books far quicker than you could possibly read them? Have you had to curb your book buying habits until you can catch up with yourself? Or are you a controlled buyer, only purchasing books when you have run out of things to read?

Well, it’s hardly possible for me to be a book glutton.  Occasionally, I buy a book because it is cheap or it came highly recommended, and then I end up not reading it for a while or never finishing it.  This happened to me this year with Inkheart and The Fiction Class.  However, most of the time when I buy a book, I read it so fast I wish I would have lingered with it longer.  Case in point:  I finally got my hands on the newest Sookie Stackhouse book this weekend, and I read it all Monday after school.  I also recently devoured the first three books in the Fablehaven series and the first two books in the Vladimir Tod series, which my nice hubby got me at the book fair at our school.  So book gluttony is hardly possible, since I never seem to have too much to read these days.  Plus, when can one ever have too many books?  If such a person exists, please feel free to send your extras my way.

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday prompt:

My husband is not an avid reader, and he used to get very frustrated in college when teachers would insist discussing symbolism in a literary work when there didn’t seem to him to be any. He felt that writers often just wrote the story for the story’s sake and other people read symbolism into it.

It does seem like modern fiction just “tells the story” without much symbolism. Is symbolism an older literary device, like excessive description, that is not used much any more? Do you think there was as much symbolism as English teachers seemed to think? What are some examples of symbolism from your reading?

So, I have to say, I agree that a lot of modern literature seems to lack symbolism, but it certainly isn’t dead.  I do think there’s a lot of symbolism in literature both old and new, some of it intentional and some of it maybe not.  As an English major, I had to be a symbol-hunter in college.  As an English teacher, I help my students find and work through symbols in literature.  But when I read for pleasure, I ignore the symbolism most of the time.  I just want to read the book, that’s all.

To provide an example, the Twilight series (for all its other good and bad qualities) has a lot of symbolism in it.  Even the titles and the covers of the books function symbolically.  Come to think of it, most vampire literature contains symbolism (we all know what those fangs really stand for, har de har). 

You can find symbols almost everywhere in literature, but you just have to look.  Or, in my case, to choose not to look.

I’ve been on a massive blogging hiatus lately, including my Booking Through Thursday responses.  So, I’m back in the saddle, at least for this week.  Here are the questions:

Q:  Are you currently reading more than one book?
A:  No.  Sometimes I do this, but right now I’m not reading anything at all.  I just finished re-reading Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones last night, and I am going to start the sequel (City of Ashes) tonight.

Q:  If so, how many books are you currently reading?
A:  Oops, I explained that already.  Eh.

Q:  Is this normal for you?
A:  For now, yes.  When I was in college, I might read several books at once for all of my separate English classes.  Now, I usually only read 2 at a time at the most.  Sometimes I read a book for use on enotes.com (I’m an editor there, so I re-read books that are frequently the subject of questions) and another one for pleasure reading.  But usually I just read one at a time, albeit rather quickly.

Q:  Where do you keep your current reads?
A:  Usually they end up wherever I left them last.  If I read in bed, they’re on my nightstand.  If I read in the living room, they’re on the buffet table or on the couch or coffee table.  If I’m reading at school, I keep them in my purse to transport back and forth to school/home.