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!

Believe me, there are some I'd consider. I have a crush on David Simon because of the mid-section of "A Year On The Killing Streets".

Don't you have any accidental conflations?

I can't think of any with books. With some TV shows (and DVDs, videos, whatever), if I see a particular scene again I'll sometimes get a memory-flash of where I saw it the first time, and who else was there, and often portions of the conversation we were having. Or, the other way, if I'm doing something while watching TV, the next time I do that task I'll remember what I was watching. Which I discovered back when I'd do homework with the TV on.

I get the same memory-links with music occasionally, but not as much. I suspect I give books more of my attention, and music less, while something on TV comes in close enough to the 50% mark to get linked with whatever's going on around me.

I have a hazy, nostalgia-tinged memory of being about nine, sitting under a tree in our back yard in early autumn, while reading Something Wicked This Way Comes. After I finished it, I went into the house and announced to my parents that it was The Best Book Ever.