Book it
Got that Tuesday night meme-ing feeling. Prowling, I find a book meme:
1. One book that changed your life: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury: with this one, I said goodbye to political science and never looked back.
2. One book you have read more than once: Gravity’s Rainbow: used to be the Easter book.
3. One book you would want on a desert island: Grace Paley’s Collected Stories. All you need to feed the soul.
4. One book that made you laugh: Padgett Powell’s Aliens of Affection. Or his
5. One book that made you cry: Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. You-know-who’s death. Read it on the fifteenth floor of the Melrose Hotel in
6. One book you wish had been written: This one makes no sense to me. For seventeen years, I wished Pynchon’s follow-up to Gravity’s Rainbow had been written. Of course, I’ve got two novels in the can that I wish had been published.
7. One book you wish had never been written: The Horse Whisperer or any of John Bradshaw’s derivative dreck.
8. One book you are currently reading: Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms.
9. One book you have been meaning to read: Thoreau’s Collected Journals.
posted by murat11 at 11:25 PM
4 Comments:
It's always a treat to read what you have to say about books, Paschal.
1.Poly sci, huh?
2.Pregunta: What do you mean by the Easter book?
3. I thought you and The Dream Songs might run away to a desert isle. Me, I might get along nicely with Alice Munro's Loveship, Hateship, Courtship, Marriage.
4. I laughed over some of T. Earley's stories in Here We Are in Paradise. I've laughed over a lot of books, but that's what came to mind.
5. Cried over Atwood's Cat's Eye. That grand-sweep-of-a-life thing she does with the protagonist's paintings made me go to pieces.
6. This must be a koan.
7. The Secret. Truth be told, I haven't read it. But I've met one too many persons who keep talking about stepping into their power after reading The Secret. One who actually said she thought the Holocaust victims "created their reality." This is the flip side of right-wing, holier-than-thou cruelty. I cringe.
8. Manette Ansay's Sister.
9. Munro's The View from Castle Rock.
Glad you joined the cause there, San. (I'm just coming off watching No Country for Old Men, so it'll likely show in the rhythms here. God, what a glorious mess.)
1. Texas/Mississippi Student Body President Harvard boy - what else is the damn fool gonna do. Thank god Quentin Compson set me straight.
2. Time was, a friend and I would haul out GR to read about Easter time. Call it our Lenten book? Nothing Lenten or Easter about it, just seemed like a special thing to do.
3. Thought long and hard about JB/Henry's dreams: there's more variation in GP. Ms Munro would suit me almost as fine.
4. I'll have to take a look.
5. Having a cry at Atwood: that's a new one on me. I'm not doubtin' you: I'm just thinking of Oryx and Crake. And thinking about the time I sat next to her when we (Gemini Ink) brought her to SA: she had on some nifty shoes, kinda Carl Perkins-like (petite size, of course).
6. Not a koan; maybe a Coen lurking. Just another unpublished novelist whining about the premises.
7. Books like The Secret (and Oprah's infallible readiness to endorse them: see the James Frey debacle: her evisceration of him - eventually - did not let her off the hook) set my teeth on edge. Bradshaw's guff was The Secret before there was a Secret. Nothing set me on edge more than to have a client (back in my therapist days) want to talk about the Schlockey Master of Guff. Of course, I smiled and nodded.
8/9: More for the future.
Read on, cuz.
Classics Illustrated; Bob Dylan liner notes; menus at Denny's; obsessing over a perfect paragraph from The Wycherly Woman; tryng to decipher what Thelonious Monk mumbles to Charlie Rouse in the documentary Straight-No Chaser.
Bob: You shame us all.
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