Six Things and Two Challenges

Egad, I’ve been tagged. First, here are some six things:

Six Random Things About Myself:

1. You know how people can roll their tongues? I can do that. I can also roll my tongue upside-down (like an inverted ‘u’). What you have to do is brace the sides of your tongue against your bottom teeth, and then pop the top up. Go on, try it.

2. I love teacups. I love how delicate they are, and how fun to drink tea out of, and all the different patterns. I don’t have a large collection — okay, so far I only have three — but they’re the first thing I look at after books whenever I’m in an antique shop or suchlike.

3. As far as I am able to remember, I more or less taught myself to read, with Garfield cartoons of all things. I used to sit in the sun-porch and page through them. I’m not sure when looking turned to reading, but somewhere along the way it did. (Isn’t it amazing that people learn to read, when you think about it? All these weird shapes suddenly turn into things with meaning — and then the whole world opens up.)

4. I have written two and a half rather awful novels, thanks to NaNoWriMo, which I discovered in my last year of high school. I think that some bits may have had their moments, but taken corporately, gosh they’re bad. But it was a good experience: I met lots of cool people who also submitted themselves to that particular flavour of insanity, and got to write a lot as well. And perhaps some of the better bits may be salvaged to other projects.

5. I have a thing for stationery and journals. Especially journals. I love looking at the covers, I love cracking them open for the first time. I love seeing rows and rows of them in the shop, and picking out that special one to take home. And I love filling them — but only for a while. Usually I only get about a quarter of the way through, or less, before it goes on the shelf and I wonder about getting a new one. I’m just a user, I guess.

6. I can, haltingly, play the Rubber Ducky song from Sesame Street on the piano.

Rules: Link to the person that tagged you, post the rules somewhere in your meme, write the six random things, tag six people in your post, let the tagees know they’ve been chosen by leaving a comment on their blog, let the tagger know your entry is posted.

Tagged: Honestly, I don’t have any idea who’s done this or not. If you’d like to, consider yourself tagged!

Two challenges:

Because everyone needs more reasons to read (well … not really) I’ve decided to join two more challenges! It looks like I’ll be finishing the 100+ Books Challenge within the next two or three months, and so I’m eager to find something new.

First: A Daring Book Challenge

The idea of this one is to read either one book from each category, or nine books from the list entire, or several complete series from the list, or all of the books! I haven’t picked my books yet — there are LOTS — but I’m excited for this challenge. There are a lot of excellent books on the list, and many I’ve never heard of.

Second: Book Awards II

This is a somewhat less hefty challenge, where the goal is to read ten award-winning books in ten months. Easy-peasy! Again, I haven’t chosen my books yet, but I will try to do so (for both) in the next few days and will update my “Challenges” page accordingly.

And if you’ve read this far, and don’t know about it already, be sure to take a look at my giveaway — open until June 3!