I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie

My uncle was visiting years ago and said he only knew of one person who had more books than we did. He said that was a doctor. I didn’t think we really had that many books, although we had hundreds of books. A lot of years have passed and our book collection has become much smaller. There was a point that we decided we needed the wall space, and shelves for other things, and we had a grand give away of the books we decided we didn’t need anymore. We still have a lot of books (probably a couple hundred): the books we reference a lot, reread now and then, signed copies, Folio books, special and rare books. For awhile we were getting a lot of Kindle books (our Kindle libraries are quite large), but when they got to be the price of paperbacks, and triple the price of good used books, I went back to buying real books. I also found Kindle books are difficult when doing research. Laurie is reading books on her iPad because she can dictate notes and comments in the pages, which turn like a real book, something she can’t do with her Kindle.

I’ve been doing more research for papers lately, so my novel reading has been much less. I have several books by other bloggers I need to read. I do quite a bit of writing. I’ve tried doing stories with characters, but all my characters are one-dimensional and they end up seeming the same to me. I’m really impressed how people can develop characters because I can’t seem to.

Here’s an interesting tidbit for you. I’ve presented three papers at conferences about how natives of north-central New Mexico have a unique way of speaking and vocabulary, and that I’m a part of that way of speaking. I guess you can say that for any regional dialect. Grammarly gives me a weekly progress report, and no matter how many words I write, the reports show around 1/3 of the words I use are unique, and that I consistently use 95% or more unique words than other Grammarly users. Which supports my thesis to some extent. For example, last week Grammarly reported that it checked 9,656 words I wrote, that I used 3,387 unique words, and it noted: “You used more unique words than 97% of Grammarly users.” I’m not sure how I come up with so many unique words, but the stats are interesting. Although, it bugs the hell out of me that they are tracking everything I write in a browser.

You are a lover of Latin, I believe you mentioned in a recent post? Do you have a “Book of Beasts”? I have a facsimile of one that is beautiful and the descriptions of the animals are fascinating. Have you heard of the book “Saga Minds”? It’s an interesting take on the Icelandic Sagas by a Russian written during the Cold War years. The book is extremely rare in English. Most of them are in university libraries. I found a copy that I was able to purchase. Like Little Jack Horner: What a good boy am I?

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