Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Confessions!

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week, the participating bloggers answer a top ten list to a specific topic.

This week's Top Ten: Bookish Confessions. Here are mine, in no particular order.

1. I always read when I'm eating. Always. Unless there are other people (besides family, my mum always reads while she eats too) around or I'm not at home. It's like a break or down time. Some people might consider it rude or weird, but I just like it. What I dislike is watching TV while I eat.
2. My book editions must match. Same publisher, same height, same format (paperback/hardcover). Even if that means I have to wait. I hate it when the publisher changes the format or cover style in the middle of a series - it drives me nuts.
3. I never break the spine. None of my paperbacks have those (in my opinion) ugly lines on their backs from opening them too much. I also take care not to bend the edges etc. Only exception: when I buy used books. They're usually well-worn anyway, and I like it. I like the old-book-smell, and I love it when I find notes by the previous owner in them.
4. I can usually take a break reading a book at any time. Middle of a sentence or page - doesn't matter. Sometimes I get the strange urge to put it aside at the most suspenseful point (like, the graveyard scene in Harry Potter 4). It's not because I don't like the book or that it's boring. I don't really know why this happens sometimes.
5. Even though I'm Swiss and my first language is German (though Swiss German is quite different from standard German) I nearly never read German books. I hate translations. So much gets lost, and the wording is often awkward. When I realized I was translating the translations back into English in my head, I knew it was time to stop buying German books unless they're by German authors.
6. I don't have a library card for non-scholarly libraries. The books I want, they only have in German, and the English selection is often small. No way am I paying a yearly fee for that. Besides, I want those books for my collection and would probably end up buying them anyway even though I've already read them. Downside: I spend tons of money on books.
7. Whenever I go to England, I buy tons of books because they're way cheaper there than here. It makes me so mad to see $6.99 printed on the back of a paperback book but here they're sold for the Swiss equivalent of around 18 or 19 dollars. It makes me feel that I'm getting ripped off, which is sad because I like actually physically browsing books at bookstores. But I buy mostly online.
8. Sometimes I despair at the amount of great books there is out there. I will never get around to reading them all in this lifetime, and that makes me sad. I have more than 200 books on my to read shelf on goodreads and they're online getting more. On the other hand, it's a sign of the human genius that we can come up with so many different stories!
9. I really like poetry. I know a lot of people don't really know what to do with it, but I love it. I love many different styles - anything from Early Modern sonnets (Sidney, Wyatt, Shakespeare...), the Romantitcs (especially Keats), T.S. Eliot, Milton, Stephen Crane, but also more modern(ist) poetry like William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Ginsberg... I could go on and on and on. I like flowery metaphoric poems as well as short, terse, raw ones. Rhyme or no rhyme, it doesn't matter. It just has to reach me on some level.
10. I find it very very hard to give books away, so my bookshelves are often crammed. I admire people who can just give dozens of books away when they're moving because I could never do that. Also, I organize them in an intuitive way - not by color, not alphabetically. I keep all books by an author together and sometimes it depends on the height of a book, but not always. I usually put those next to each other that I think would... get along? ^^'' Um yeah. I probably sound like a crazy lady just now >.<

Alrighty, now let's hear your comments (do we share some quirks?) and please link me up to your own posts! I'm really curious to read about all your confessions :D