Top Ten Tuesday: 10 Bookish Confessions

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish.

1. When I was growing up, I was awful at looking after books - I used to put them face down while open to save my place in a book, thereby irrevocably damaging the spine. I'm blushing even thinking about it!

2. Perhaps tied in to the above confession, I don't own a bookmark. (Well, I'm sure I do somewhere, but not one I could put to hand immediately.) I tend to use train tickets instead. Or occasionally my debit card, although there've been a couple of occasions when I've tried getting money out and realised it's back at home in the middle of a book, so I don't normally do that anymore.

3. I think Tolkien is the most overrated author in the history of the universe. Give me Dragonlance Chronicles over Lord of the Rings any day.

4. I barely ever read reviews. Actually, scratch that - I read quite a lot of reviews but ONLY from bloggers I trust, or reviewers at the Bookbag. I never take any notice of average scores at Amazon or Goodreads due to all the fixing that goes on.

5. I love Gossip Girl - at least the first few books. Yes, they're trashy and have no literary value and are so filled with brand names that they may well be virtually indecipherable in 50 years time if most of those companies have gone out of business. But they're written with a stunning voice and helped get me back into reading YA after years spent reading adult fiction. "Our **** still stinks, but you can't smell it because the bathroom is sprayed hourly by the maid with a refreshing scent made exclusively for us by French perfumers" (starring out mine) is still one of my favourite ever quotes.

6. I hate the TV adaptations of Gossip Girl and the film adaptation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which both butchered wonderful source material. On the other hand, I love the TV adaptation of Rosamunde Pilcher's Coming Home, which may have taken more liberties but featured such a stunning cast that I can forgive them anything. (Also, I watched that before reading the book, which may have helped.)

7. If I won the lottery I would spend more money on books than would normally be considered sane. In particular, I'd try and bribe Curtis Jobling with huge sums of money to let me read the rest of the Wereworld series well in advance of publication, because dammit, I need to know how it ends!

8. I have hundreds of books I've never read (and, worryingly, may never get round to reading because I keep getting review copies and stuff!) In particular, I went through a spell a few years ago of grabbing anything in The Works or similar shops for less than £2 and then realising I wasn't particularly interested in it.

9. 80% of the adult books I read are non-fiction. I think the only adult authors I currently read are Ali McNamara, Lee Child and Anne O'Brien. (Which may be the most bizarre trio around...)

10. I've never avoided reading a book because of a one-star review - but I have a mental list of at least a dozen authors I won't read because there's no way I could judge them fairly after seeing their responses to negative reviews. Bizarre, isn't it?