Book Meme

Prose or Poetry?
Prose mostly, but I read a lot of poetry and try to keep up with at least a few contemporary writers.

Book(s) you're reading now:
Various historical sources related to the book I'm writing

Last book you've read:
Half-Magic (children's book, read aloud to the young one)
A Fearsome Doubt (crime novel by Charles Todd)

Next book you're going to buy/read:
Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children

Book you've read the most times:
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by "Hannah Green" (Joanna Greenberg). About a young Jewish girl in a mental hospital. I read it so often as a teenager that I can still recite entire passages.

Other oft-reads:

As a kid -- A Wrinkle in Time, the Little House books, various Nancy Drews, Elsie Dinsmore (a 19th-century girls' story), Sans Famille (a French children's book translated into English as The Adventures of Perrine)

As a teenager -- see Rose Garden (above); also A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight, by Victoria Lincoln. (My life-long obsession with Lizzie Borden started with this book.)

As an adult -- Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, various Sherlock Holmes stories

Longest book you've read:
I'm not sure. Gone With the Wind was 1,000-some pages, but I don't remember how large or small the type was (I read it in junior high). There's Middlemarch, of course, and Tom Jones, plus a lot of Dickens. Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb weighs in at about 900 pages (including endnotes, but I read those, too.)

 Book you've read in the shortest time (relative to the number of pages):
Again, I'm not sure. I can get through a medium-sized crime novel in a long afternoon.

One book you wanted to read that disappointed you:
To Kill a Mockingbird (I found it sentimental and ultimately more inclined to reassure white people than really to challenge racism. But I was an adult when I read it; most of the people I know who love this book read it in their early teens. It may be one of those novels that won't move you much if you don't read it at just the right time in your life.)

Have you read books in a language different from yours?
Yes.

Writer you've read the most books from:
"Carolyn Keene" (pseudonymous author[s] of the Nancy Drew books)

Some books you like (not necessarily your faves):
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, which is one of my faves
Desert of the Heart
     (novel; Jane Rule)
The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas
     (biography; Helen L. Horowitz)
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold
     (lesbian history)
Arcadia
     (play; Tom Stoppard)
The Treasure Seekers, the Would-Be-Goods, Five Children and It
     (children's books by E. Nesbit)
Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For. . .
     (series of comic strip books)
Crime novels, among them. . .
     The Lost Keats by Terence Faherty
     Booked to Die by John Dunning (really disappointed by his later stuff, though, even if his hero
        is named Janeway)
     The Intersection of Law and Desire by J. M. Redmann
     Judgment in Stone by Ruth Rendell

3 books you don't like:
1. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
2. most of Hemingway
3. Poisonwood Bible