A fun book-themed meme from 50 Books.

Memes are a step up from quizzes, right? I know I had to do more work to finish. One of these days I'll be doing real posts on a regular basis. This is like training wheels. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

1.Hardcover or paperback, and why?
Paperback, so I can carry them around. Plus with hardbacks I always worry about what to do with the dustjacket and if I should re-sell it because I spent so much money on it. If you wait too long to sell a hardback and the paperback is out, the resell is for shit. Probably 95% of the hardbacks I own are parts of a series because I got too impatient to wait for the paperback.

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
Lots of Plots? Ehh, I don’t know. Lane’s Books? My Inevitable Bankruptcy?

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…
Oh, this is tough. Usually if I quote it’s from poetry or a movie (I don’t have the memory to quote from novels). Maybe this, from Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night.
“She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses.”

Or maybe the first line of May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude “Begin here. It is raining.” It's immediate and does exactly what she intends for the whole book.

4. The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be…
Neal Stephenson. I love both his scifi and history of science novels, but I wouldn’t be so intimidated that we couldn’t have a good time.

(note: the original meme wrote (mis-wrote?) the options as “alive or diseased.” bwah)

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…
The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Lots of different pieces and styles to enjoy, plus little bios of the poets.

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…
Temporarily takes away just enough memory so I could experience each of my favorite books like it’s the first reading.

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of…
My grandma’s house, especially the shelf in her living room that held a set of 1950’s era World Book Encyclopedias that I read to learn all about Greek mythology.
Or, you know, dust that makes me sneeze.

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…
Now that I’m thinking about Gaudy Night, I’d have to say Harriet Vane.


9. The most overestimated book of all times is…
Hmmm, maybe Finnegan’s Wake? I like James Joyce’s other novels and I don’t mind working hard to understand a great piece of literature (I once took a class on Ulysses where we covered one chapter a week, and it was really fun!) But the Wake is so dense it’s really like mental masturbation.

Look, there are worse books, clearly. But the Wake is like the emperor's clothes. Everyone's afraid to admit that it fails because they assume the fault is their inability to understand, not the fault of the book.

10. I hate it when a book…
Tries to change or be too much at the end. With this same meme, Jag Soker Job sites Middlesex for this (an otherwise almost flawless book). I think the problem goes back at least as far as Robinson Crusoe. I never knew until I actually read the thing that he leaves the island about ¾ of the way through. Nobody ever mentions it because that part of the book is stupid.