In the spirit of some lighthearted Friday fun, I decided to poll the DGLM office and find out who were the fictional characters they were most attracted to. Results below!

• ​Michael: Mr. Rochester from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, for his unattainable nature.
• Lauren: Laurie from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, for his impetuous and willful spirit.
• Mike: Louisa from Jojo Moyes’s ​Me Before You for her sweet, tough, and caring character.
• Sharon: Gilbert Blythe from L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, for being in love with Anne for her personality and ideas, not just her looks—and the fact that his feelings for her didn’t get in the way of being a good friend.
• Kemi: George Knightley from Jane Austen’s Emma, for his compassionate character and his long friendship with her, despite his romantic feelings.

Luckily, I am not alone in my sick sense of humor. Yesterday, Barnes & Noble started a game on Twitter called #snackbooks, combining food and books (two of my favorite things!). They contributed “Wafflehouse-Five” and “A Guac to Remember.” They got a significant number of responses. Some of my favorites included:

Life of Pie

Munch Ado About Nothing

War and Peas

The Lion, the Witch, and the Warheads

As I Lay Frying

….there are also countless others, but go check out their Twitter page here to see some of the other contributions. (Some enthusiasts even designed covers!)

My personal contributions are:

The Sound and the Fry
Alice in Waffleland
Anne of Green Gobbles
Feast of Eden

What would some of your #snackbooks titles be? 

What interested me most, though, was the celebration of the “excuse” to stay home and catch up on reading. Being something of a homebody, I frequently spend one or both weekend days holed up to read no matter the weather, so Jonas was less of an excuse and more of an atmospheric backdrop. So I am curious about those bookworms for whom this was a deviation from their usual weekend routine. Do they simply have more dynamic social lives than I do? Do they make more brunch/theater/museum plans thus putting me to shame as a New Yorker and cultural citizen by comparison? I thrive on long hours in silence, alone, to counterbalance the busyness of the work week and the stimulation of the social engagements – I figured a lot of avid readers feel this way but perhaps my introversion is more rare than I thought.

What’s keeping us from making every Saturday a snow day?

I went to a bar I’d wanted to try, ordered a drink, and sat the very end of the bar and started reading Paradise by Toni Morrison. Oddly, the background noise was soothing instead of distracting, I mindlessly munched on bar snacks, and an hour later, paid my bill and went home, having finished a good chunk of my book. Since then, I’ve tried to get to bars or restaurants a little early if I’m meeting friends—for the sole purpose of whipping out whatever book I’m currently reading and getting another chapter further.

Where are your favorite, odd places to read? What’s the best atmosphere for you to read in? (For more Friday fun, check out this Instagram that documents some great subway reading. And anyone under 21 who’s reading this, don’t try this until you’re of legal age, please.)

Thing is, I hate surprises.  Really, I do.  I actually break out in hives at the thought of a surprise birthday party.  Whether the surprise is good or bad is irrelevant.  I don’t like to be there when it’s happening.  My peripatetic childhood, which involved periodically arriving in a new place whose culture (and even language) I didn’t understand made me wary of the unexpected.   That, combined with my type-A, OCD nature makes me dread anything I can’t see coming from a good distance.  (I will be taking all of this up in therapy some day, do not fear.)

As a result, I am one of those rare people who also appreciates a certain amount of predictability in my reading.  Rather than finding a book whose ending I can intuit or guess at a waste of time, I enjoy being able to focus my attention on the author’s prose, character development, and attention to detail.  I like category fiction because it generally follows a formula and it’s the skill of the author at things other than surprising us that tends to set these works apart.

So, of course, it irks me no end to admit that some of my most memorable reading experiences have involved not just a surprise ending but a shocking one.  My initial response is usually rage and confusion, followed, after a while, by admiration at the author’s ability to yank the rug so forcefully out from under me.  It’s so hard to pull off, but when it’s done right, it tends to make the narrative it closes unforgettable—especially when the finale seems organic and not gimmicky.  I hate surprises but I tend to end up loving books that surprise me.

What are your favorite surprise endings?  And why?

So, it’s Tuesday night, you’ve totally blown past your deadline for posting to the blog, you’re completely blocked, and nothing on-line gives you any substantial ideas. What do you do?

I wish we had a gorgeous, spacious, display-possible apartment in which to showcase an enormous collection of books whose purpose isn’t so much to be read, but more to flip through while bored, amuse guests or serve as some other kind of curiosity whether for conversation’s sake or whatever else. Then I would just keep filling our lives with conversation pieces and coffee table décor, though I might branch out into non pet or baby animal related material, too.

It’s been some time since I’ve gifted a new silly book and I think it’s a tradition I’d like to reawaken (she says once before forgetting about it come Christmas). It all started with Rachael Hale’s 101 Cataclysms soon followed by her equally adorable 101 Salivations and moved on to various books detailing absurd dog houses (sorry, palaces), various babies at the zoo and a personal favorite in which you simply picked which of a pair of cats shown was the cutest and then moved on to the next page and pairing.

As you can see, it’s easy to get overwhelmed! When books are produced just based on a concept of cuteness, wackiness, beauty or what have you, things can get out of hand. Sure, a book consisting solely of photos of pretty front doors in the countryside (just riffing here, but I’ll put a bet down that such a book exists) is a marketable concept and I’m sure enough people would buy it to give it a shot, but where do you stop? How do you choose? I ask this of both publishers and book buyers. When do you put your foot down and call a halt to the hundreds of coffee table book ideas surely pitched each day or, on the other side of the coin, how on earth do you decide which one to buy? I can’t tell you the sheer volume of photos of kitties I looked at before settling on Cataclysms (it may also have had something to do with the title).

Okay, I need to stop now or I’ll just keep going and get carried away (the first time I uttered this statement today was roaming the aisles of Party City, which offered a surprisingly similar bombardment of color, sparkle, cuteness and choice), but how do you feel about books that seem to exist just for the heck of it? And if you’re pro these books, do they ever make it to your home, or is their sole purpose exhausted after one flip-through, a chuckle and an “aww” in the bookstore?

To be honest, I have “read” this book on more than two occasions.

Lately, I’ve been reading with no hands. Well technically I’ve been listening with no hands, but that’s a far less impressive feat. Essentially, I’ve become an audiobook junkie.

Many of my colleagues have asked for recommendations about what to read on vacation. Suggestions range, but notice the common element here? Vacation. There’s a reason people read a lot on vacations. It’s relaxing, it’s enjoyable, and I can’t stress this enough: people have the time.

But what about if you just can’t find the time to pick up a book during the work week? What if you’re like me and you wake at 5:00 am, go to the gym, head off to work, head home, eat dinner, and then go to bed?

I’ve found that audiobooks are actually very enjoyable to listen to, and they’ve quenched my thirst to read quite nicely. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the same, but my morning workouts, commute, and dinner are now all enjoyed while “reading.” Suddenly, I have all the time in the world to enjoy a good book. Granted, some genres are generally easier to listen to than others, but that’s a topic for another post.

How about you guys? Ever listen to an audiobook? I’m currently looking for my next good listen. Suggestions?

But, what about the less than dreamy heroes?  The Raskolnikovs and Yossarians? The neurotic and often substance abusing characters in Hemingway and Fitzgerald novels?  The angst-ridden suburbanites of Updike and Cheever?   I mean, sure, they’re hot messes, for the most part, and most do not have washboard abs.  But, aren’t they just a little sexy too?  Or is it just me?

Who are your swoon-worthy literary heroes?   And, do you prefer tall, dark and handsome or short, insecure and funny?