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Member: Winter_Maiden

CollectionsYour library (4,033), Currently reading (3), All collections (4,033)

Reviews26 reviews

TagsBOOKS (1,191), Non-Fiction (506), Fiction (479), Folklore (388), Social Sciences (385), Non-fiction (289), Humanities (273), British literature (221), fantasy (146), novel (146) — see all tags

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

GroupsAlmack's, Bookshelf of the Damned, San Diego Bibliophiles

Favorite authorsCharles Addams, Yoshitaka Amano, A. J. Arberry, Jane Austen, Philip Barry, Ambrose Bierce, Roy Blount, Jr., Giovanni Boccaccio, Jan Bondeson, Jorge Luis Borges, Charlotte Brontë, Jan Harold Brunvand, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Truman Capote, John Le Carré, Lewis Carroll, Raymond Chandler, Geoffrey Chaucer, G. K. Chesterton, Donald Cosentino, Amanda Cross, Emily Dickinson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Will Durant, Umberto Eco, John Egerton, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ian Fleming, Shelby Foote, E. M. Forster, Neil Gaiman, Martin Gardner, Henry Louis Gates, Robert Gordon, Stephen Jay Gould, Graham Greene, Peter Guralnick, Dashiell Hammett, Peter Laughlan Heath, Georgette Heyer, Patricia Highsmith, Zora Neale Hurston, Aldous Huxley, M. R. James, P. D. James, Diana Wynne Jones, Pauline Kael, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Randall Kennedy, Florence King, Ira Levin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sinclair Lewis, H. P. Lovecraft, John D. MacDonald, Philip MacDonald, Don Marquis, John McPhee, H. L. Mencken, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Falaky Nagy, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Walker Percy, S. J. Perelman, Edgar Allan Poe, Philip Pullman, François Rabelais, John Shelton Reed, Rick Riordan, Berton Roueché, J. K. Rowling, Dorothy L. Sayers, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, David Shipman, Victoria Simmons, Dodie Smith, Stevie Smith, John Steinbeck, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Stewart, Rex Stout, Josephine Tey, David Thomson, James Thurber, J. R. R. Tolkien, Calvin Trillin, Patricia A. Turner, Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, Cornel West, Tennessee Williams, Edward O. Wilson, Gahan Wilson, Nathan D. Wilson, P. G. Wodehouse, C. Vann Woodward (Shared favorites)

About meFolklorist and college instructor. Working at a bookstore helps pay the rent and deplete the bank account.

About my libraryThe product of organized study, random enthusiasms, impulse, and the hoarder's instinct. I have about a thousand books with me, and the rest in storage nearby. Everything except a mess of academic journals is now cataloged--and I'm hoping not to add too much more until I have a place to put them all!

Regions of interest: Britain and Ireland, the American South, Greece and Rome, West Africa and African Diaspora, Central Asia, what used to be called the Near East, and Japan.

Areas of interest: folklore (especially narrative and belief), anthropology, history (especially Greek and Roman, Byzantine, British and Irish, and American Southern, all with an emphasis on cultural history), genre fiction, and children's literature. These days I am in general allergic to graphic novels, romance novels, self-help books, and anything inspirational--but life thrives on exceptions.

Fiction: anything from the bogs of time to the present, but particularly Shakespeare, the British novel, Southern lit, and the genres of mystery, horror, ghost stories, a small amount of fantasy, and the comedy of manners as practiced by Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. I read much more genre than serious literature. (And, yes, I do draw a distinction, although some of my post-modern friends refuse to.)

Quirks: utopia-building, the Silk Road, medical mysteries/oddities, the culture of death, the Harlem Renaissance, British and American life from the Edwardian era to Punk (and especially the Long Weekend between the world wars), classic movies and film criticism, Bollywood, the Black Death, popular music and its culture, poets whose work I grew up identifying with (but I don't otherwise read much poetry), Southern Gothic, armchair travel, pseudoscience (because of my late father), schizophrenia (because of my late mother), Japanese culture, erotica, genealogy, belief and skepticism, language (especially historical linguistics, slang and onomastics), "New Yorker" cartoons, Yoshitaka Amano, children's illustration, fashion, and curmudgeonly culture critics such as H. L. Mencken, the Algonquin set, and Florence King. Oh, and editions of Alice (illustrators, translations, paraphernalia) and anything about Memphis, Tennessee.

Religion: Since I have a lot of books on religion (especially Christianity, Vodou, and Neo-Paganism), I should perhaps add that I am not myself a Christian, a Vodouist, or a Neo-Pagan. I am, however, deeply interested in many aspects of religious belief and practice, including popular representations of traditional religions. You might sum me up as a skeptic with an imagination, who believes (with Claude Lévi-Strauss) that the mythopoeic impulse is as much a part of us as language is.

Membership LibraryThing Early Reviewers/Member Giveaway

Real nameVictoria

Account typepublic, lifetime

Connection NewsConnection News

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/Winter_Maiden (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Winter_Maiden (library)

Common KnowledgeSeries (369), Awards (318), Characters (4472), Places (880)

Member sinceJun 15, 2009

Currently readingSpanish for Reading: A Self-Instructional Course by Fabiola Franco
Cultural Anthropology: An Applied Perspective by Gary Ferraro
History of Beauty by Umberto Eco