My mom would smile at me rather wistfully whenever she would see me get wrapped up in a book (unless, of course, said wrappedupness was interfering with her plans for the day). She said seeing me read reminded her of her father, who although he was "just" a Midwestern dairy farmer with a fifth-grade education (had to leave the one-room schoolhouse in 1912 to work on the farm full-time), was a complete bookaholic who always had something to read on him, even if it was just a seed-dealer's sales pamphlet to peruse during his lunch break on the tractor.

Harvard, Yale, MIT and Stanford were pipe dreams before the US was founded.

I enjoyed reading The Da Vinci Code merely because of the number of times I stopped and exclaimed to my mother "And now guess what they're doing! Guess! Idiots."

Someone had given it to her as a Christmas gift on that vacation, and I snagged it because I'd seen a few people on the beach reading it. I have no idea if she bothered with it when I was done breaking it down.

Reading Anne of Green Gables for the first time. My grandmother had always (and still does) scoffed at my reading choices which were usually teen romance, ie Sweet Valley High and the like. I was also obsessed with those kids-dying-of-leukemia books (I mean, really? What demographic were those for?). I watched the first run of the Megan Follows movie on Wonderworks on PBS and saw the book in a bookstore. I picked it up and grandmother saw I was interested in something decent for once, and bought it on the spot. I read it all in one day, laying on my sailboat in Lake Michigan. She eventually bought all eight books for me. And, I'm rereading them right now.

Where the pleasure of the reading that particular work is so great and so closely allied in your mind with the physical details of the experience.

Hm. I don't think my brain files things this way. I remember "oh, I stayed up till dawn reading this" or "this passed the time on a cross-country flight" but those are anecdotes that happen to feature a book, not things I'd reminisce about the next time I read it.

I guess I keep my physical and intellectual pleasures segregated. For their own protection. If my surroundings are remarkable, I'm going to have a hard time concentrating on a book, and if the book's remarkable, I won't register my surroundings.

Don't you have any accidental conflations? I can't eat almond cookies without thinking about reading 1984 or vice versa. They're not remarkable...but they're locked together.

And there's a certain album and a certain book that are linked too--but I can't remember either of them. If I could, I'd remember the other. Both drowned in Katrina, so no bookshelf browsing to help me out.

I can not get with Strega. The whole of a first reading is with me forever. It was hot, the day Shelley wished me to first appreciate her Monster. I loved the coolth of her words and her monster, frozen there in the ice.

It was cool.

I am officially a disgusting person. Because it took me two reads to get that Gus was talking about "Frankenstein", which I've never finished, and not a make-out story. ETA: The first time I read a Pelecanos, I didn't like it and thought my mom was out of her mind for bringing it to me. Because it had the awful review on the cover that said it was like Pulp Fiction in some overhyped way, and I waited for that part, and, nsm.

It's possible he made out with the book.

I remember finishing Daniel Deronda in the evening after a day of rambling about the windy Mount Auburn Cemetary, looking for ancestors. (Also Bernard Malamud, and Isabella Stewart Gardner.) It was a lunar eclipse, and I was almost done with the novel, and even though it wasn't what I had wanted or expected it to be -- it suffers from its age terribly -- it was still a portrait of worthwhile subjectivities.

I also read a fair portion of Ivanhoe on a beach, hardly realizing till I started it that, in fact, Sir Walter Scott is perfect beach-reading!