Sunday, September 08, 2013

the Liebster Award



The Liebster Award from Rel:

Yay! Rel was kind enough to nominate me for a Liebster Award which means I get to answer fun things for all of you. I look forward to meeting Rel this weekend at my first ACFW conference in Indianapolis.....


1. What is the name of the most recent book you have finished and loved?
Okay, well, I kind of am terrible at blogging of late because I have been really busy working on a new novel; but Lori Benton's Burning Sky was a book I absolutely L-O-V-E-D. Someday you will read my thoughts on it. For now, just know that it was the bomb...



2. What is the 17th line on the 125th page of the book you are currently reading?
"Later I learned Etruscan, Greek, Egyptian, and Roman treasures were numbered amongst them"---I'm reading Born of Persuasion by Jessica Dotta.



3. When did you realize you were a true book lover?
In grade one we were given an assignment: if we read to an adult for a half hour every day we got stickers on the board and then won a shiny maple leaf pencil. I read a bit of Black Beauty to my mom everyday. I loved it. There was also the time in Kindergarten when I cried because I had to return Dr. Seuss' The Sleep Book back to the school library. Dad read it to us every night and when it had to go back I was devastated. Don't worry, this has a happy ending: I learned that the great thing about libraries is that you can sign the books out again....



4. What is your genre of choice? Why? It honestly depends. When I am reading CBA stuff, I prefer Historical and Historical romance because I just think it is one area that the industry really excels at and it includes some of my favourite author voices in the world of Christian Fiction. When I am reading non-Christian, I like classics, LOVE nautical fiction (PATRICK O'BRIAN) and British mysteries: Martha Grimes. Honest to pete, though, I also like fantasy and YA and literary fiction so it really depends on the mood I am in and what I have a taste for.



5. What is the name of your ‘comfort reading book’? (one you will pull out and read when you want something familiar)
I have a few: The Blue Castle by L M Montgomery, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle by Catherine Webb. If I am far from home, these books take me back. If I have a chill, they are my blanket.






6. Who has encouraged you the most in your reading pursuits? My aunt Annette really fostered all of my creative pursuits and outlets: classical music, theatre, opera, film. Her bookshelves were full of feminist tomes and musical history and classics like Jane Eyre, Emma and Manon Lescroart and I would steal them off her shelf. She gave me my copy of A Room of One's Own. But, I also enjoyed how much she cherished books. The first time she read Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, she scrawled underlines in pencil of the most poetic nuances: "ropes of smoke" "bog boy", I really liked those tremulous little lines on the page. She did the same for The English Patient. My dad is also a huge bookworm: not fiction so much as history, theology and biography so I know he helped me catch the reading bug. He has books everywhere.


7. Your most memorable hero, and why?




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Gosh. I don't even wanna start with this. Umm. Wow. Okay, well I am a big Sherlock Holmes fan so obviously he and I have a special relationship. But, I am going to say that Stephen Maturin from the Patrick O'Brian canon has really influenced the way I look at the wonderful dimensions of characters as painted and scripted on page. Maturin just fills me with some sort of soft reflection, some pensive pursuit of understanding every beguiling tenet of his multi-faceted personality. I ache for him and applaud him and champion him and long to steal inside his mind. He just is...well.... he's a modern classic, that's for sure.


8. If you had to swap lives with a character, who would it be and why? Valancy Stirling of The Blue Castle ---it's my favourite romance so I would be sewn into a perfect love story, I would get to hang out with Barney Snaith and I would get to live my days on a gorgeous Muskoka island which really floats my boat.




9. Do you alphabetise your books by author or title, on your bookshelves? by author



10. Why do you read? Because my life is not exciting enough, because I want to steal back two hundred years ago and smell and sense it, because I want to travel forward, because I want to creep into the recesses of other's minds, because I want to find other people who are just as anomalous as myself, because I want to find the antecedent to dreams and the answer to everything, because I want my imagination to talk faster than my brain can keep up, because I want to understand God and the universe, because I am not good enough on my own.


This is open to any reader of the blog. Join in and have fun.

3 comments:

Birdie said...

Oh, love your answer to 'Why do you read'. Very poetic (and true!)

Heather Day Gilbert said...

Nice to know more about how your love of reading started (separated from that Dr. Seuss at an early age!).

Jessica Dotta said...

Yay! I had to stop in and comment, seeing as you quoted my line :-)