Book Meme from springheel_jack
Like springheel_jack, I am doing this from memory, by guess, and by, um... golly.
1) What author do you own the most books by?
Hahahaha... I think I should start as I will have to go on. Not Marx, though I have quite a few by Marx. But the most titles? Probably L. M. Montgomery, followed by Elizabeth Peters and the Mormon Murderess, Anne Perry.
2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I also own several copies of the Communist Manifesto, and several copies of Alexandra Kollontai's Love of Worker Bees and for some reason several copies of Marge Piercy's He, She, and It. Hm. And at least two or three copies of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.
3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
That's my own besetting grammar sin, so, no.
4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
"Most of them are lesbian cartoon characters." I love that I can say the exact same thing here as you S_J. I love Alison Bechdel's fictional world, myself. Not so into Tank Girl, though. Or whatshername, Paisano-something.
5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
I reread constantly. The ones that I've read over and over and over and over, though, are not the heavy hitters -- though I've read various works of Marx several times, the books I've read upwards of twenty times (that's probably an underestimate, seriously) are giant genre-fiction doorstops: James Clavell's Shogun, Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers, Colleen McCullough's books on the Roman Republic, and the Jean Auel so-far five-volume epic saga of her imagined Prehistory.
6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
At ten I was kind of evenly divided between the complete collection of Holmes stories given me by my uncle, Roots, ditto, and the Anne of Green Gables series by L. M. Montgomery, having just visited Prince Edward Island.
7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
Hm. I try very hard to avoid reading books I suspect I will dislike, because I have a terrible time stopping reading something once I've started. This past year? I didn't like Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food, something like that title. It was sort of half interesting, and half really infuriating because so impossible for most people who have to work for a living to do.
8) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
Hm. I waited a long time to read Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran because it seemed perilously close to an Oprah book... that level of chic popularity. But it was surprisingly good and actually made me willing to read Nabokov -- I'd already been given a push by M. and masqueraderie, both of whom took college courses focusing on that author. But Nafisi's fascinating lit crit (as well as how deftly she wove it into political analysis of Iran after the revolution) has probably shifted the balance. I really liked her book, and was interested by her politics: as a kid, I met a number of Iranian comrades who were in or around the US Socialist Workers Party (back before it was completely a cult, just hella undemocratic) and they were very interesting to me. They were one of the first impulses to learning foreign languages, too -- I learned how to say "workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains" in Farsi. (Transliterated: kargarun jahun hambastand az dast heche bejoz zangiraton). Anyway, I think Azar Nafisi was in that same college student/revolutionary left political space when she was in the United States, and then, like lots of Iranian leftists, she went BACK to Iran after 1979. Much of the book is about how she realized the revolution couldn't be shifted to the left, and how she tried to navigate the ever narrowing spaces left to her as a woman academic. It's very lyrically written, too. I liked it a lot, in much the same way that I liked Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel(s) Persepolis.
9) If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
Yeah, for 'everyone in the world', some kind of basic socialist propaganda, though I am not sure what. For everyone I know? Hmmm. I'm too aware that I tend to do this anyway, want friends to read what I've read. And everyone has such different tastes! Huh. Well, to be honest, I really liked the extremely popular Stieg Larsson posthumous trilogy (I've read the first two -- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire)... and did you know he used to be in the Swedish section of the Fourth International? That's fucking awesome right there. Apparently his 1977 holographic (but unwitnessed) will not only would have given his life partner most of his property, not that he had any then, but also would have given tons to the FI, via the Swedish section. Sigh.
10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
Hell if I know. I can't keep in mind who's already won. Has Nadine Gordimer? Probably... or maybe I am mixing her up with that other South African, Doris Lessing.
11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
I generally like books better than their movie counterparts. But because kids always ask me, I wish that some of the books I read aloud would be made into movies. Surely the CGI effects exist now for Anne McCaffrey's dragon novels to be made into movies? Or maybe Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Below the Root, And all Between, and Until the Celebration?
12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Any more comic books or toy advertisements for transforming robots. Anything else by either Grisham or whatshisname, the DaVinci Code guy -- Dan Brown.
13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I do dream a fair amount (I mean, and remember them, at least for a bit in the morning)... but honestly, I don't really Mary Jane in my dreams, if that's the right term. Hm. Having looked that up (with some difficulty) in Wikipedia, I see that a) it's "Mary Sue", and b) I haven't been understanding it correctly -- readers don't Mary Sue; writers do. Huh. Anyway, I can't remember any dreams with writers, or books, or literary characters.
14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
Oh, man, how to measure? I read crappy romances, especially in the Regency era. I read sugary chick lit. That's all very lowbrow. I read Young Adult Fiction, but most of that is NOT lowbrow.
15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
I guess Capital volume 1 (I've never even started volume 2 or 3) but I have to say, you would probably be surprised at the amount of humor Marx works in. That was one snarky guy.
16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?
I haven't seen all that many live. I've seen a few of the histories -- maybe Henry IV, Part 1. That seems pretty obscure.
17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Yeah, this is a dumb question. I haven't read many exemplars of either. I dislike a lot of French prose, to be honest, though I love French poetry. I can't stand Flaubert and Balzac. On the other hand I loved Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (in English) when I was a kid, and Voltaire's Candide (that in French, once I was in high school) and quite a few plays, from Molière's L'avare and L'invalide imaginaire and Tartuffe, to Cocteau's Antigone, to even some Ionesco. And I like Sartre and Camus, what I've read. I've read a lot more French literature than Russian, so I guess I have to say French. I've only read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, which, for what it's worth, I quite liked.
18) Roth or Updike?
I dislike them both, though I have had a half-shamed appreciation of a couple of Updike short stories, read in high school. But in general, neither.
19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Sedaris
20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
I liked the modern translations of Chaucer that I've read, though it's only the Prologue. But I love Shakespeare. Can't say I've read more than a few stanzas of Milton.
21) Austen or Eliot?
I'm not THAT into any of that lot. I guess Austen. If the choice were Austen or Brontë, it would definitely be Austen.
22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I have been trying to read Moby Dick for ages and ages. It's really annoying, because having started it, I know that it's fucking AMAZING, and I would swoon from the language. Damn. Also, The History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky. I would like to read that.
23) What is your favorite novel?
Hard. I like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn very, very well.
24) Play?
I like plays a LOT. I love the following playwrights: Kerry Reid (shout out!), Michel Tremblay, Tony Kushner, and Mary Zimmerman. I'd see anything written by them. But I like LOTS of plays, in English and in French. And, I suppose, in Spanish, though I've never read or seen one. I have a yearly membership in the Berkeley Repertory Theater, at teacher prices. That's excellently enjoyable -- I mean, sometimes uneven. But really good.
25) Poem?
I came to poetry late. I never even read "The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" until a few years ago. I liked it -- the language is wonderful. That's it for Eliot, though. I like a lot of French poetry... Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau, Eluard, Jacques Prévert...
26) Essay?
God, no idea.
27) Short story?
I like Conan Doyle's Holmes stories (though I actually like Laurie R. King's new Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series better than the original, in fact, and better than any other addition to the canon... or supplement to the canon?). Other short stories... I like Raymond Carver, what I've read of him.
28) Work of nonfiction?
Eh. Apart from histories, biographies, and politics, I don't read a lot of non-fiction. I like Rosa Luxemburg's collected writings. I liked Lewis Thomas's collected essays on biology a lot -- The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail -- I think that was the title. And Stephen J. Gould. And books by Studs Terkel and by Howard Zinn.
29) Who is your favorite writer?
No possible way to choose.
30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I don't know. I mean, people don't actually think she's a good WRITER, do they? Stephenie Meyer.
31) What is your desert island book?
I want an iPad with my entire library on it. And extra batteries. I refuse to choose.
32) And… what are you reading right now?
Kashmira Sheth's Boys Without Names (she's an author of YAF, she's Indian, her stuff is amazing... this is the third of her books I've read -- Keeping Corner was an excellent historical novel about a young woman who is widowed and who must "keep corner" for a year, in the 1920s, and then have no life, either... but who joins the nationalist movement, specifically moved by a social reformer named Narmad, more than by Gandhi, and it's fantastic. Also, I am re-reading Laurie R. King's The Language of Bees, and waiting for my sister to lend me our stepmother's English copy of the final Stieg Larsson book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
1) What author do you own the most books by?
Hahahaha... I think I should start as I will have to go on. Not Marx, though I have quite a few by Marx. But the most titles? Probably L. M. Montgomery, followed by Elizabeth Peters and the Mormon Murderess, Anne Perry.
2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I also own several copies of the Communist Manifesto, and several copies of Alexandra Kollontai's Love of Worker Bees and for some reason several copies of Marge Piercy's He, She, and It. Hm. And at least two or three copies of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.
3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
That's my own besetting grammar sin, so, no.
4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
"Most of them are lesbian cartoon characters." I love that I can say the exact same thing here as you S_J. I love Alison Bechdel's fictional world, myself. Not so into Tank Girl, though. Or whatshername, Paisano-something.
5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
I reread constantly. The ones that I've read over and over and over and over, though, are not the heavy hitters -- though I've read various works of Marx several times, the books I've read upwards of twenty times (that's probably an underestimate, seriously) are giant genre-fiction doorstops: James Clavell's Shogun, Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers, Colleen McCullough's books on the Roman Republic, and the Jean Auel so-far five-volume epic saga of her imagined Prehistory.
6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
At ten I was kind of evenly divided between the complete collection of Holmes stories given me by my uncle, Roots, ditto, and the Anne of Green Gables series by L. M. Montgomery, having just visited Prince Edward Island.
7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
Hm. I try very hard to avoid reading books I suspect I will dislike, because I have a terrible time stopping reading something once I've started. This past year? I didn't like Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food, something like that title. It was sort of half interesting, and half really infuriating because so impossible for most people who have to work for a living to do.
8) What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
Hm. I waited a long time to read Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran because it seemed perilously close to an Oprah book... that level of chic popularity. But it was surprisingly good and actually made me willing to read Nabokov -- I'd already been given a push by M. and masqueraderie, both of whom took college courses focusing on that author. But Nafisi's fascinating lit crit (as well as how deftly she wove it into political analysis of Iran after the revolution) has probably shifted the balance. I really liked her book, and was interested by her politics: as a kid, I met a number of Iranian comrades who were in or around the US Socialist Workers Party (back before it was completely a cult, just hella undemocratic) and they were very interesting to me. They were one of the first impulses to learning foreign languages, too -- I learned how to say "workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains" in Farsi. (Transliterated: kargarun jahun hambastand az dast heche bejoz zangiraton). Anyway, I think Azar Nafisi was in that same college student/revolutionary left political space when she was in the United States, and then, like lots of Iranian leftists, she went BACK to Iran after 1979. Much of the book is about how she realized the revolution couldn't be shifted to the left, and how she tried to navigate the ever narrowing spaces left to her as a woman academic. It's very lyrically written, too. I liked it a lot, in much the same way that I liked Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel(s) Persepolis.
9) If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
Yeah, for 'everyone in the world', some kind of basic socialist propaganda, though I am not sure what. For everyone I know? Hmmm. I'm too aware that I tend to do this anyway, want friends to read what I've read. And everyone has such different tastes! Huh. Well, to be honest, I really liked the extremely popular Stieg Larsson posthumous trilogy (I've read the first two -- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire)... and did you know he used to be in the Swedish section of the Fourth International? That's fucking awesome right there. Apparently his 1977 holographic (but unwitnessed) will not only would have given his life partner most of his property, not that he had any then, but also would have given tons to the FI, via the Swedish section. Sigh.
10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
Hell if I know. I can't keep in mind who's already won. Has Nadine Gordimer? Probably... or maybe I am mixing her up with that other South African, Doris Lessing.
11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
I generally like books better than their movie counterparts. But because kids always ask me, I wish that some of the books I read aloud would be made into movies. Surely the CGI effects exist now for Anne McCaffrey's dragon novels to be made into movies? Or maybe Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Below the Root, And all Between, and Until the Celebration?
12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Any more comic books or toy advertisements for transforming robots. Anything else by either Grisham or whatshisname, the DaVinci Code guy -- Dan Brown.
13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I do dream a fair amount (I mean, and remember them, at least for a bit in the morning)... but honestly, I don't really Mary Jane in my dreams, if that's the right term. Hm. Having looked that up (with some difficulty) in Wikipedia, I see that a) it's "Mary Sue", and b) I haven't been understanding it correctly -- readers don't Mary Sue; writers do. Huh. Anyway, I can't remember any dreams with writers, or books, or literary characters.
14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
Oh, man, how to measure? I read crappy romances, especially in the Regency era. I read sugary chick lit. That's all very lowbrow. I read Young Adult Fiction, but most of that is NOT lowbrow.
15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
I guess Capital volume 1 (I've never even started volume 2 or 3) but I have to say, you would probably be surprised at the amount of humor Marx works in. That was one snarky guy.
16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?
I haven't seen all that many live. I've seen a few of the histories -- maybe Henry IV, Part 1. That seems pretty obscure.
17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Yeah, this is a dumb question. I haven't read many exemplars of either. I dislike a lot of French prose, to be honest, though I love French poetry. I can't stand Flaubert and Balzac. On the other hand I loved Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (in English) when I was a kid, and Voltaire's Candide (that in French, once I was in high school) and quite a few plays, from Molière's L'avare and L'invalide imaginaire and Tartuffe, to Cocteau's Antigone, to even some Ionesco. And I like Sartre and Camus, what I've read. I've read a lot more French literature than Russian, so I guess I have to say French. I've only read Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, which, for what it's worth, I quite liked.
18) Roth or Updike?
I dislike them both, though I have had a half-shamed appreciation of a couple of Updike short stories, read in high school. But in general, neither.
19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Sedaris
20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
I liked the modern translations of Chaucer that I've read, though it's only the Prologue. But I love Shakespeare. Can't say I've read more than a few stanzas of Milton.
21) Austen or Eliot?
I'm not THAT into any of that lot. I guess Austen. If the choice were Austen or Brontë, it would definitely be Austen.
22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I have been trying to read Moby Dick for ages and ages. It's really annoying, because having started it, I know that it's fucking AMAZING, and I would swoon from the language. Damn. Also, The History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky. I would like to read that.
23) What is your favorite novel?
Hard. I like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn very, very well.
24) Play?
I like plays a LOT. I love the following playwrights: Kerry Reid (shout out!), Michel Tremblay, Tony Kushner, and Mary Zimmerman. I'd see anything written by them. But I like LOTS of plays, in English and in French. And, I suppose, in Spanish, though I've never read or seen one. I have a yearly membership in the Berkeley Repertory Theater, at teacher prices. That's excellently enjoyable -- I mean, sometimes uneven. But really good.
25) Poem?
I came to poetry late. I never even read "The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" until a few years ago. I liked it -- the language is wonderful. That's it for Eliot, though. I like a lot of French poetry... Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Cocteau, Eluard, Jacques Prévert...
26) Essay?
God, no idea.
27) Short story?
I like Conan Doyle's Holmes stories (though I actually like Laurie R. King's new Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series better than the original, in fact, and better than any other addition to the canon... or supplement to the canon?). Other short stories... I like Raymond Carver, what I've read of him.
28) Work of nonfiction?
Eh. Apart from histories, biographies, and politics, I don't read a lot of non-fiction. I like Rosa Luxemburg's collected writings. I liked Lewis Thomas's collected essays on biology a lot -- The Lives of a Cell and The Medusa and the Snail -- I think that was the title. And Stephen J. Gould. And books by Studs Terkel and by Howard Zinn.
29) Who is your favorite writer?
No possible way to choose.
30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I don't know. I mean, people don't actually think she's a good WRITER, do they? Stephenie Meyer.
31) What is your desert island book?
I want an iPad with my entire library on it. And extra batteries. I refuse to choose.
32) And… what are you reading right now?
Kashmira Sheth's Boys Without Names (she's an author of YAF, she's Indian, her stuff is amazing... this is the third of her books I've read -- Keeping Corner was an excellent historical novel about a young woman who is widowed and who must "keep corner" for a year, in the 1920s, and then have no life, either... but who joins the nationalist movement, specifically moved by a social reformer named Narmad, more than by Gandhi, and it's fantastic. Also, I am re-reading Laurie R. King's The Language of Bees, and waiting for my sister to lend me our stepmother's English copy of the final Stieg Larsson book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.