Today’s Book Blogger Hop question is:  If you could add one interactive feature to reading books, what would it be?

I’d love it if books could be more sensory somehow.  There are picture books (and movies) for the visual senses, and audiobooks sometimes include sound effects.  Beyond that we’d have to stray into fantasyland, I expect, but it would be awesome if books could somehow give you (as an option) a tactile sense when they describe, for example, soft silk or rough tree bark.  There are plenty of things characters feel I wouldn’t want to feel, so it would need to be optional!  Likewise, I’d like to experience some of the smells that are described in a story, but not all of them.

Taste would be the trickiest but maybe the coolest too.  I tend to be intrigued by food in books, especially fantasy-sounding food like bubbly pies (from Anne McCaffrey’s Pern) or butter pies (from Diana Wynne Jones’ A Tale of Time City).  I’m sure fans have made up recipes online, and I’ve even read a few books that included a recipe or two at the end, but the truth is I’ve never made any of them…so I guess what I really want is a replicator that would just spit out the food described in the book I’m reading!

Today’s Book Blogger Hop question is:  Other than book reviews, what do you feature on your blog?

Along with reviewing books, I sometimes review movies or TV shows, which I kind of consider the same thing…I mean, it’s all stories.  I also post updates about my own writing each Wednesday, and I do some kind of internet-community/reflect-on-books thing each Friday, generally either the Friday Face-Off or this Blog Hop.  I usually check each one and decide which prompt I like better that week!  I post quarterly about my reading challenge updates, and I was doing a Sunday spiritual quote that I need to get started back up.  Oh, and I post a LOT about my writing when I have a new book coming out soon!

So it’s all pretty story-focused one way or another…which is, after all, supposed to be the focus of this blog!  I have other things in my life, but this space is all about the stories. 🙂

Today’s Book Blogger Hop question is:  When did you first know you’re truly a bookworm? Did you lose sleep over a novel?

I think I’ve always known I was a bookworm…?  My parents took me to the library weekly since I was toddler-age, and I memorized The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree before I could actually read (so I count it as the first book I ever “read”).  I had a book bag all through my childhood that I’d bring home full of books from the library every week.  So this dates back!

Reading was so normalized that I don’t know if there was a point when I realized not everybody read this much.  Probably somewhere in elementary school, I imagine, when I noticed the divide between people who liked sports and people who liked books (I’m sure some people cross over but the two camps seemed clear to me at age ten!)  Ironically, perhaps, my clearest memory that should have told me I was unusually fond of reading is of reading a book (!) where the kids got points for prizes for each page they read.  I was politely incredulous of the very low numbers of pages they were reading and counting as good…

I can’t say I really lose sleep over books.  I stayed up late recently to find out the ending of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, but the previous book I can distinctly recall staying up late reading was Jane Eyre, five years earlier.  And I don’t lie awake thinking about books in a worrying or angsting kind of way.  One thing I like about books is that they don’t make me feel that way!

When did you discover you were a bookworm?  Do other people often lose sleep over books?