[Note: To date I've resisted memes in filling my blog content, if only because I'm fixated enough on my own various small obsessions never to lack content. This one, which I came across on Light Reading (by way of Kate's Book Blog) was too good to pass up though.]
1. One Book That Changed Your Life
Without a doubt, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It's a novel that contains the whole history of American culture (and even crosses the pond in meaningful ways) yet offers such a completely personal version of experience. It's comprehensive without sacrificing accessibility. It's erudite but steeped in the vernacular. Novels should contain multitudes, it convinced me, but they need also embody the writer's best sense of hope. This one does all that.
2. One Book That You've Read More Than Once
While I've read Ellison's novel many times (maybe five, six), I'll say J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey here. I'm smitten with the Glass family. I admit I'm enamored with the thought of New York apartments and genius families. ("Oh, to have more academic relatives to talk with!" says the guy who has to explain what he does exactly every time he returns home for a family visit.) As an adolescent reader I was taken with Salinger's prose style. Now older, I find myself drawn to the book's major problem: where does the cynical, ironic deep thinker turn to settle his/her monkey mind and find true spiritual calm?
3. One Book That You'd Want a Desert Island
This may appear to compromise my reading tastes, but I'm an unbashed lover of baseball, and so I'll say Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstract for its heft, and for its digestability. Anecdotes, sidebars galore!
4. One Book That Made You Laugh
I'll say the first half of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or the first half of Robert Sedlack's The African Safari Papers. Apparently family dysfunction really hits my funny bone. Go figger.
5. One Book That Made You Cry
The second half of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. Apparently family dysfunction really hits my--
6. One Book That You Wish Had Been Written
...or at least finished according to its author's plan? Definitely Ralph Ellison's second novel, posthumously published in much-edited form as Juneteenth. I actually cried when I first read this one too--for its flashes of greatness, and for its tragically unfinished quality.
7. One Book That You Wish Had Never Been Written
Now that's just mean. If I answer this, instant karma's gonna get me.
8. One Book You're Currently Reading
Still trudging through Don Quixote. Oh, to be a faster reader!
9. One Book You've Been Meaning to Read
Where to start? David Bodanis's E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation. Or Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Or George Plimpton's Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring.
There. Now wasn't that fun?
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8 comments:
great blog you have, I shall be visiting again!
great taste you have too...
I love reading what other people read. I'm always craning my neck to see what the person beside me is reading on the bus.
Yes, I get a lot of strange looks.
WW, thanks for the compliment.
PW, I do the same thing. It's a conversation starter on planes for me, to ask about the neighbor's book if it looks decent. If the person next to me, on the other hand, is reading one of those large-print How-to-Make-More-Money kind of business books then I put my headphones on. :)
You are the sort like we're our sort. Have you visited The Deblog, written by Debra Hamel? I believe you will enjoy it.
Nice blog WS. Will be back!
Also, that's the second Don Quixote reference I've heard in 2 days, and I'm many years past my Spanish Lit days.
It's a good book, but an even better story, which might just make it fabulous if you do the math.
I'm not one for starting conversations on the bus, but if they catch me I just nod and smile at their book. Then they are very accomodating and let me see what they are reading.
This post encouraged me to finally get over my fear of Salinger and read Franny and Zooey. Very glad I did. Too bad I only discovered American literature with a vengeance after two years of russian around.
Two years of that and twenty years of atrocious puns.
Kat, glad you read Franny and Zooey. It's sublime in its sarcastic simplicity. The ending bit with the phone never fails to touch me.
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