A book meme

Ms. Kitty at Ms. Kitty's Saloon and Road Show has tagged me with a meme, seven random or weird book facts about myself. Hmmm...

1. I like happy endings. Or at least if not happy per se, having some redeeming feature to hold on to. I really detest the modern trend towards bleak, no hope, no good guy stories.

2. I don't believe there's been a two week span in my life since 1965 in which I haven't read at least one science fiction novel. Granted, sometimes it may have been re-reading an old favorite, but those times are balanced out by weeks in which I read three or more new ones.

3. My favorite "classic" authors are Kipling, Poe, Doyle, and Shakespeare.

4. It distresses me that I now need reading glasses. Was my mother right, when she found me draped upside down over the sofa with a book, to say, "Don't read like that, you'll ruin your eyes."?

5. Books taught me a lot about life. When I first started buying my own literature, comic books were 10 cents, and paperbacks were 50 cents. I remember well the traumas of first a price increase from 10 to 12 cents, then a sales tax being added to it... true outrages to a child on a fixed (allowance) income. I just bought a book that is actually four "graphic novels" (comic books) reprinted as a single set for $19.95. That's fifty times as much as I used to pay for four comic books. No wonder I became a conservative.

6. While still a teenager, I dated a girl who worked in a bookstore. She used to give me books for presents- books with the front cover torn off. I didn't know what that meant at the time. When I found out, I made a point of buying new copies of each of those books, even the ones I didn't like.

7. We have a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. Will we be the last generation to own a printed encyclopedia?