(1) I like jumping on bandwagons. My feed is currently loaded with these, so I figured I'd join in the fun.

 

(2) My parents nearly named me "Eowyn" and my sister "Arwen"--they figured it would go with their dogs, Bilbo and Gandalf, and their bird, Pippin. Fortunately, my mother intervened. I grew up with LotR practically memorised--my family owned multiple copies of the books as well as other Tolkienalia, including "Farmer Giles of Ham," the (rather awful) unabridged audio recordings, the (wonderful) BBC radio performance, the Rankin-Bass and Bakshi animations, the ancient PC game (Radagast is an evil boss and there's a bug near Moria that causes Bill the Pony to reproduce asexually), and a record of Tolkien reading "Tom Bombadil.

 

(3) My teenage rebellion was declaring allegiance to Harry Potter over Middle Earth.

 

(4) I took a semester of Welsh in college to learn how to pronounce the names from Welsh mythology.

 

(5) For about a decade now, I've limited all fiction reading to when I am exercising on an elliptical machine at the gym. Partially because of this, I always listen to music when I read and try to create soundtracks for each book.

 

(6) I tend to doodle sketches of characters from most of the books that I read. It's not exactly "fanart" because I draw from books where I'm not necessarily a fan, and calling it "art" stretching it. One of these days I want to take a figure study class.

 

(7) My only form of transportation is a bike.  I tend to view drivers as The Enemy, so every time a driver gives me the right-of-way at an intersection, it restores my faith in humanity.

 

(8) I'm a total anglophile and listen to BBC radio on a regular basis. I read enough books in both dialects of English that I can no longer spell properly in either the UK or the US. My current dream goal is to move to Liverpool or London.

 

(9) I've only been outside the U.S. a few times, but I've lived in seven different states that stretch across the country, from NC to TX to CA.

 

(10) I got into the online reviewing world when I used Goodreads as a text-based dataset for a school datamining project in 2010.  I felt like I should contribute back, so I wrote a few reviews and got addicted.