Er, this is my first meme, which was thrown at me by this nice fellow, so please go easy on me if I fail to demonstrate mad l33t meme skillz.
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Who started this meme, a High School teacher? Cause seriously, I used to get my students to answer this when I taught Farenheit 451. Harry Potter is almost universally the book most 15-year-olds want to preserve for the good of culture (except that one kid who said 'The Matrix'. Sigh.)
However in terms of the book that it would be the most fun to be for the rest of my life-in-exile, I'd have to choose the joyous Book of the Film of the Story of my Life, which means I'd get to enjoy such fun diversions as losing my wife, seeing posters of her fellating her new lover all over the London Underground, going to a party on an exotic Fijian Island, and masturbating/weeping on the floor of my office in New Zealand House. Good times.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
I assume we're talking about characters from books, rather than, say, Ariel, The Little Mermaid (I'll accept you, tail and all, Ariel!). Right! Of course you are. Uhm ... off the top of my head ... I suppose the last character I had a crush on, last month actually, was Stephen Maturin, from (the novel) Master & Commander. Everything he said was so intelligent and interesting and his character was so reserved yet curious about everything around him. As Jack Aubrey observed: "At times I fear to leave him alone for even a moment, yet at others I feel he could command the entire fleet." Just a character I really would have loved to actually spend some time talking with.
Oh, you mean like a romantic crush? Ohhh. Not to my recollection. I do recall, deep in the mists of memory, become quite disturbingly aroused (I was, like, twelve) by a scene in Dragons of Winter Night, when Tanis stumbled apon Goldmoon bathing in a pond. Ruff!
The last book you bought is?
I don't actually buy that many books. I have an enormous pile of them on my bedside table, all of them either given or lended to me by friends. Whenever a book blows me away, I then rush out and buy multiple copies to distribute to my friends. The last book I did this for was Love All the People, by Bill Hicks, which I bought five copies of and distributed them liberally around Christmas. It's just a wonderful, smart, hilarious, thoughtful, and occasionally even touching book that I wanted everyone around me to have read. When I get excited by books, I want other people to be excited (er, by the books, that is), too.
What are you currently reading?
I usually have two books on the go: one sits beside my bed which I read before I go to sleep, the other is usually smaller and lighter (often an e-book I read using my palm pilot), which I carry with me everywhere and read in snatches.
My bed-book is Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. This was lended to me by a friend who described it as "the best book you'll ever read", and he has so far proven extremely prophetic, it is excellent. It's absolutely mammoth in proportion (about 1200 pages- I'm about halfway through), is incredibly well written, very, bitingly funny, achingly bleak, intelligent with a bloody edge, and just good fun. It's difficult to say what it's about: It's set slightly in the future, in which America has more or less sublimated Canada and Mexico, and now uses the border between Canada and America as a massive waste dumping zone. Canadian Anti-American Terrorist cells have distributed something known as 'The Entertainment'- a downloadable programme so entertaining that anyone who views it enters a blissful coma. This is but one facet of a 200-faceted diamond- the book will frequently break away from its main narratives just to devliver unrelated short stories set in the same world. The 400+ footnotes alone are frequently short stories unto themselves. A massive, gargantuan work of inspired genius. I'll put a full review up on this site when I finish.
My 'travelling book' is usually either something to do with Star Trek, or some airport novel I've picked up (Sushi for Beginners, The Da Vinci Code, that sort of fluff. I really like the 'Reacher' series by Lee Child). However at the moment I'm reading the brilliant Post-Captain, the second book in the 20-book Master & Commander series. Oh look I know you're going to say it's all 'boys-own adventure' stuff but it's so much more than that! It's so smartly written it'll knock your wig off. Patrick O'Brien writes so convincingly in the voice of both brutes and intellectuals, and knows so much about the era he writes of, it's difficult not to be impressed, or to learn a great deal, with a great big grin on your face as you do.
Five books you would take to a deserted island
Well, I never re-read books once I've read them, so they'd all have to be 'books I'm looking forward to':
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky - One of the most lettered men I know recommends it highly, and it's quite long, so it would probably help to wile away those desert hours.
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster - Er, it comes in a single volume, so that counts as one, right? Anyway, I've just recently discovered Auster, and am absolutely smitten with him.
Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds - as I've read all his other works and, assuming that no rescue from said island was forthcoming, would hate to go to my grave thinking there was still one out there that I hadn't read. Death wouldn't be so bad if, in the afterlife, they just gave me all the books I'd been meaning to read and let me have at them. Plus AR's books are often so dense, they need a good re-reading just to sort them out.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman - as you always need a bit o' Neil, and this is the one book of his that has up until now escaped me.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - not just because they are huge and would take a very long time to read, and contain both poetry and plays (for me to put on with my little crabby friends), but because, when all is said and done, there was a reason he was so huge, and that's because he was actually very, very good at what he did.
Oh and probably The Bible or the Koran. Cause, y'know, I should probably read one of them, given the circumstances.
I would of course trade any of all of these choices if that meant I could take the biggest book of blank pagest known to man, and a pen, so I could write stories myselves and read them to the crabs (likewise for encyclopaedias, which make for awesome reading).
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Er, Bimbler, because she's always complaining about having nothing to blog about.
Gordon, because he's smart and I could probably add some good book recommendations to my reading list out of his answers.
And Razorhead because....aw, who am I kidding, these are the only three bloggers who actually read my blog, outside my technical support, who has to read it. Hi, guys! Stop me if you're not memers, or have done this one already without me noticing.
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