THE CONFESSIONS TAG

As my first tag of the new year, I’ve chosen this one from the handful of topics I’ve collected over time from my fellow bloggers. And I’ll start with a momentous confession: yes, I’m addicted to books, I hoard them and gloat over them like Gollum over the Ring. So what? 😀

Ok, now to the real questions of the tag…

Which book, most recently, did you not finish?

I had high expectations for this SF story, but in the end it did not work for me as much as it did for the majority of my fellow bloggers who read it, so we had to part our ways a little past the halfway mark.

Which book is your guilty pleasure?

Guilty? Why should there be any kind of guilt attached to reading? Tsk! 😀

Which book do you love to hate?

It’s possible that the DIVERGENT fans here will in turn hate me for this, but this is one of the novels that started my uneasy relationship with YA and ended up giving the genre a bad name from my point of view. The world depicted here made little sense to me and I felt a strong antipathy for the main character, while the story felt too imbued with clichés to be enjoyable.

Which book would you throw into the sea?

No book deserves this fate, and the fact that I don’t like a book does not mean someone else could not enjoy it, so instead of committing a book I don’t like to the sea depths, I would prefer gifting it to someone who could appreciate it.

Which book have you read the most?

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That would be either Tolkien’s LORD OF THE RINGS or Herbert’s DUNE: in the past (before book blogging compelled me to keep moving forward) I re-read both several times, always enjoying their different, but equally compelling, stories.

Which book would you hate to receive as a present?

Mmmm… that’s a difficult one: people who would give me books as a present know my tastes, so it’s highly improbable that they would choose a book not in line with them. Putting hate aside, let’s say I would not be pleased to receive a book I already own.

Which book could you not live without?

All of them?

Which book made you the angriest?

I guess it would be A GAME OF THRONES: back when I started reading the series, in 2002, I knew nothing of GRR Martin’s penchant for killing off his characters with gleeful abandon, and a certain death by execution toward the end of the book left me angry, stunned and incredulous for quite some time. By now, I’ve learned not to grow too attached to characters…

Which book made you cry the most?

I don’t cry easily over stories, so I will have to mention instead one of the books that elicited the strongest emotional response in me, and I think it must be A BOY AND HIS DOG AT THE END OF THE WORLD, centered around the powerful bond between humans and these four-legged companions who “always walked closest” to us in the long ages of the world.

Which book cover do you hate the most?

Again, hate looks like too strong a word: if I must point the finger at a cover that doesn’t do justice to the contents, I have to mention a few illustration choices for Lois McMaster’s Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, like the one below, where Miles Vorkosigan is made to look like a child wearing grown-up clothes…

As usual, I’m not tagging anyone but if you have some confessions to make, here is your chance 😀