The memory of books past...

So, I discovered Shelfari, a place to build a virtual bookshelf. It's cool. I've spent a lot of time recalling books I have read. Some I remember far more fondly than others.

I've put books from my college days-- both graduate and undergraduate. I've put books from before I went to college-- when the bulk of what I read was horror. I recall fondly reading Clive Barker at the kitchen table at our house in Como-- I remember I had to have a dictionary, he used words I didn't know and would have to look up. I learned what antediluvian meant. I learned, too, just how far the limits of good taste ran in his books. He was a favorite writer perhaps because he pushed the limits of what could be written. Some things were truly disturbing.

Unlike Stephen King, Barker never shied away from sex. Men and women, women and women, men and men...nothing was taboo. Normal sex, deviant sex, sex with otherworldly beings, it was all just out there for you to read about. Stephen King, my other favorite writer of that period, rarely wrote about sex. His books were virtually sexless where Barker's world was a magical place where anyone could have sex with anyone else. It was eye-opening.

I post my books on this site and it makes me a bit sad, too. There are so many great books I haven't read. I never finished Les Miserables. I never finished The Count of Monte Cristo (my copy was abridged-- when I read that on the cover, I stopped reading) or Madame Bovary. I've never even attempted Huck Finn and couldn't get past page 20 in Frankenstein. I say that I am a book snob. I don't know if that is true so much as I just can't read what I am not interested in. I'll find something else to read or do-- constructive or not.

I remember, too, reading The Winter of Our Discontent late one night at the house in Como. I had a bowl of rice with butter and sugar. I simply remember being totally engrossed in the book and not even noticing the time or anything else. Tammy was gone to work and my rice had so much butter, it looked more like soup.

I also remember trying to read Austen's Emma in college and wondering why in hell anyone would ever read such boring garbage. I've never seen so much walking and talking and nothing going on in all my life. Jane Eyre on the other hand was a wonderful book that won me over to the Brontes forever.

So, who's to say what books we will and will not like? I suppose I prove that we can have a markedly wide range of tastes across a plethora of genres.