The italicized label often attributive placed after the functional label noun indicates that the noun is often used as an adjective equivalent in attributive position before another noun:Įxamples of the attributive use of these nouns are bottle opener and business ethics. Looking up attributive noun, we find, for example, Merriam-Webster telling us about the label attributive used in dictionaries: A common way of expressing this is to say that book is used as an adjective, but this does not mean that the noun is an adjective. In the noun phrase book collector, the noun book is a noun adjunct, it is used attributively. His novel “The Barbarian Nurseries” was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2011 and also won the California Book Award Gold Medal for Fiction his latest work is “The Last Great Road Bum.” He’s married, the father of three children and the son of Guatemalan immigrants.Although this question almost feels like three questions in one, I will try to answer all three parts - and the general question concerning the whole sentence as well. The Los Angeles-born writer is the author of five books, which have been translated into 15 languages. Tobar has an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine and studied at UC Santa Cruz and at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. He has also worked as features editor at the LA Weekly and as editor of the bilingual San Francisco magazine El Tecolote. Tobar was The Times’ bureau chief in Mexico City and Buenos Aires and was part of the reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. Hector Tobar worked at the Los Angeles Times for two decades: as a city reporter, national and foreign correspondent, columnist and with the books and culture department. It’s a figure that this book lover thinks is way too low.

She points out that Shelfari’s Compulsive Book Hoarders group will grant you membership if you own a mere 1,000. “I donated hundreds to bookstores the Strand and Housing Works.”īussel says she still owns more than 2,000 books.

“Lest you think I’m too awful a person to have let so many books find their way into a New York City dump, I will tell you that I tried to let my books go gently in the months preceding my move,” Bussel wrote. I’ll never throw a book with my name on the cover into a trash can - among other things, it seems like bad writer karma. “The most heartbreaking part was seeing anthologies I’d edited, with my name right there on the cover, being swept away into giant garbage cans.” That’s a fairly hard-core way to deal with your tsundoku problem. She hired a trash removal service to “cart away hundreds of books - read and unread, purchased lovingly or attained at book parties or conferences” from the two-bedroom apartment where she’d lived for 13 years. “I wish I could honestly answer ‘there’s no such thing as too many books,’ but as I learned from experience, that’s not true,” she wrote for the Toast. The writer and critic Rachel Kramer Bussel approached her tsundoku problem differently.

Word for a book collector