Zoe tagged me with a book meme! Yey, thanks Zoe, now I know I'm a real blogger! She sent me a meme!!
oops, wet myself a little bit there.
It's a bit funny this, because I was just traversing the old intarnets and from The Valve went randomly to Golden Rule Jones, who had this meme, and had passed it to Matilda (which I was interestedly getting to know when Zoe handed the meme to me), and from Matilda it went to Stack, from thence to Crazybrave...howzat! yes Virginia, that's how memes work. They spread themselves about, all squishy like. I like following them around.
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be saved?
Mansfield Park it is. Nobody else will save it, and it deserves to be. I'd rather not have to read it again for a while though, is that forgiveable?
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Can't think of one I've ever had an "I want to lick you" type crush on, no; but Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited pretty much defined Ideal Boyfriend Material for me in my teens, which made for some quite bad romantic letdowns in 1980s Warrnambool.
The last book you bought was...?
I bought four at once off the same secondhand dealer: Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin; Headlong Hall by Thomas Love Peacock; Snow Mountain Passage by James D. Houston, and Now, Voyager by Olive Higgins Prouty. The first two for fun, the third for morbid curiosity, the last for school.
The last book you read was...?
It embarrasses me to have to admit this, but the last book I read all the way through was Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. The thing got into the house as an unwanted Christmas present, and they were reading it on Radio National...and I was weak....it is very, very crap. Still, I learned that English peasants had "driveways" in front of their hovels in the 17th century, that's gotta come in useful someday.
What are you currently reading?
Deliverance by James Dickey, Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy, and The Graduate, by Charles Webb. This is thesis reading. But they're all three of them very excellent novels that don't deserve to be so completely overshadowed by the movies that were adapted from them.
Five books you would take to a desert island...
I've picked books that are best read slowly and best re-read often.
Emma - Jane Austen
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Pilgrimage - Dorothy Richardson
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony - Henry Handel Richardson
Who are you passing this stick on to and why?
Mel of A Wild Young Under-Whimsy and Katy of Sushiblog, because they are heavenly angels in the blogstar firmament, and will play the meme exquisitely and fascinatingly.
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4 comments:
Geraldine Brooks! Pah! I borrowed a friend's copy of "The Crimson Petal and the White" on her recommendation that it was a cracking holiday page-turner. Managed to turn about 30 pages before turning the cover. Top idea for her new book about whatsisname Alcott, but I'm not going there.
My feelings exactly. There probably is a good book in the Papa March thing, but she's not the one to write it I don't think. Year of Wonders is the sort of book that makes me think, cynically, that if this is all you have to do to cause the critics to fall about gasping with delight then I should bloody write a novel myself. It was exactly like one of those dreadful Austen continuations except supposedly set 150 years earlier.
The Crimson Petal I couldn't finish either, and I really wanted that book to be good.
Oh, thanks for the warning. Saw an interview with Geraldine Brooks somewhere and thought that 'March' sounded promising and possibly a Mother's Day present for myself, but with that pedigree I'll wait until it's remaindered (or dumped in its thousands in the Lifeline Book Fair, like everything by Bryce Courtenay).
PS Don't you hate it when authors look and sound credible -- really liked GB's stance on war journalism -- but publish weakly? A bit like artists who produce glorious, sensitive work but come across like pigs. Know a lot of them.
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