Bookish Superpowers

Look! I'm actually posting a Top Ten Tuesday! I appear to have forgotten how to link to the page, so I'll have to look into that. Anyway, today's topic is Bookish Superpowers I Wish I Had. This is great! Who needs to fly or read minds, when you could get every book personally autographed by the author? Here are mine.

1. Never accidentally buy a book I already own. Buying another on purpose is one thing, but there's nothing more annoying than bringing home your new book and putting it on the shelf next to the one you already own. I firmly believe that bookstores make it so you can't access your Goodreads account in the store, because that is definitely how I check to see if I already own a book.
2. Read faster and still retain information. I feel like I'm a pretty slow reader. I don't understand how people with full time jobs can read 150 books a year. Maybe those people don't have any other activities. Maybe they don't have 3 people and 2 dogs living with them who require attention and care. Maybe they don't require 9 hours of sleep each night to function. Or maybe they just read quickly and can still understand what they read. Not me. I have tried to read faster, but then I'm so focused on moving my eyes faster, that I have no idea what the words said.
3. Know by reading a summary if this will be a great book for me. I blame publishers. Sometimes I wonder if the person who wrote the jacket copy actually read the book. The summary sounds so good, but when I read the book, I'm turning back to the summary to see if they mentioned the thing I just read. I really need to take the time to read Goodreads reviews of the books before I read them. But I don't want those opinions of the book to color my own. That really happens.
4. Remember the title and author of books when someone says, "It's about X, Y, Z." Sometimes I have this superpower and I'm very impressive. For example. A couple of months ago I was in a meeting where H. Rider Haggard came up. Someone said, "I don't know who that is." I said, "Oh he wrote King Solomon's Mines." Have I read that book? No. But I could come up with the title of one of his books off the top of my head. More recently, the same person was talking about David McCullough. They said, "He wrote that one book with ship on the front, in the storm." I said, "That sounds like The Wager." "Yeah! That's it." "That's David Grann." At other times, I just go "Uhhhh."
5. Know the perfect book for someone who asks me for a recommendation. Part of my job is to create reading guides for people based on a survey they fill out. I get time to research those, so that's not really not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about when someone says to me, personally, "What book do you recommend I read?" I would like to be able to give them the title of a book that would be just right for that person at that time. Not because I want to be known as the book wizard, but just for my own personal warm fuzzies. I like to help people find their best reading experiences.
6. Remember what happened in the previous installment when I pick up a sequel. I read a lot of series. Fantasy books tend to run that way. Mysteries, too. And these are my favorite genres. Sometimes it's been several years since I read the last one and I have to go research the plot so I can remember what happened. Thank God for the internet because I'm sure as hell not going back to reread all the previous books.
7. Focus for more than 10 minutes at a time. This is my dearest wish. I sit down to read and a word triggers some thought and I start thinking about that thing while I'm still moving my eyes over the words. Then I realize I've read 2 pages and I have no idea what I've read. Or I'll read something and think "What does that word mean?" so I'll pick up my phone to look it up and I'll have notification, so I'll immediately forget the word I was looking up and 20 minutes later I am scrolling through Instagram, with my book abandoned.

That being said, there are a few superpowers I don't care about.

1. I do not care to block all the spoilers of books I haven't read. I don't remember them anyway. It's fine. Someone will say, "Are you going to read this book, or can I spoil the ending?" Spoil away, if I do ever decide to read it, I won't remember what you told me.
2. I don't care if my books are pristine. I used to. I used to freak out about broken spines and dogeared pages. I like bookmarks too much to dogear pages myself, but if I have a used copy of a book and some pages are dogeared, it's fine. If I get a used copy that has someone else's annotations in it, more's the better. It will be interesting to see what someone else thought about the book we both read. I would like for my books to hold together. If it's so loved that the covers are falling off or pages are falling out, I don't care for that.
3. Meeting authors is not really important to me. I've met a few. It's awkward. If one end up at a dinner I'm at (if I ever go to a dinner), that might be okay. It would be more organic. I don't care about autographed copies of books, which is why I used that as an example in the intro. I didn't want to tip my hand.

What bookish superpowers would you like to have?