Book Meme

Through Books INQ.  Found at Barbara's Bleeuugh

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?

Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you'll read next?

Currently reading Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Just finished Wolf Hall, next to read Under the Lion's Gaze.

3. What book did everyone like and you hated?

The Lovely Bones and Bel Canto and Captain Corelli's Mandolin

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you'll read, but you probably won't?

The Kindly Ones or 2666

 

5. Which book are you saving for "retirement?" 

I'm not--no guaranteeing that I'll make it there.

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end? 

If I'm bored or in the doldrums, I indulge in a bit of ahead-reading, but otherwise sequentially.

7. Acknowledgments: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside? 

Interesting, always interesting.

8. Which book character would you switch places with? 

The Mad Hatter or the March Hare

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)? 

All books do to a greater or lesser extent.  But perhaps To the Lighthouse and I will leave it at that.

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way. 

Ulysses, Dubliners, Finnegans Wake, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and James Joyces' Dublin acquired as a result of winning a poetry contest for a poem written in a pastiche of the language of Finnegans Wake.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?

Yes.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?
Sorry folks, mundane answer here--The Bible--it goes where I go.

13. Any "required reading" you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later? 

Almost all of it--Lord Jim, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby. In High School you have no patience with ditherers and those who are lost--you haven't had the time to get lost yourself.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?

Autumn leaves

15. Used or brand new?

New, if possible.  But however I can get it.

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?

Great potential, seldom fully realized.

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book? 

I can't think of one off-hand--but there probably have been.  Perhaps Evil Under the Sun, not because the book was bad, but can you beat Maggie Smith and Diana Rigg together?

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?  

Ulysses

19. Have you ever read a book that's made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?

Nero Wolfe mysteries--I don't know that I could eat the stuff Wolfe gourmandizes; however, it is tantilizing to read about.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you'll always take?
There isn't one, unfortunately.  But it is through the confluence of many streams that I make my choices.


Sorry for the ugly formatting--a result of wholesale copying rather than retyping. (Looks fine on the original site--just contrasts strong with my own.)