Thursday, April 23, 2009

I'll never own a Kindle.

April 22nd was Book Day. What a thing. A magical thing. Here's a late survey in celebration of the best kind of print material.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Neil Gaiman, closely followed by a five way tie between Margaret Atwood, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J.D. Sallinger and Virginia Woolf.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I have two copies of Franny and Zooey, the one I read as a kid and wore all to pieces and the nicer copy I got at the used bookstore recently.

3) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Florentino Ariza. But I think it's more that I want to be in love in the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about love.

4) What book have you read more than any other?
Maybe Lonesome Dove? Oh, and Ender's Game. I like to reread books that make me feel like a 13 year old boy.

5) What was your favorite book when you were 10 years old?
Number the Stars. I had a fixation on all things Holocaust right after I went through my Egyptologist phase.

6) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I know this may get me slapped, but I really did not like Dead Until Dark.

7) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Bone! Hands down.

8) If you could tell everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino.

9) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
If you mean read to completion, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. But after three passes, I still haven't managed to finish Underworld, Mr. DeLillo.

10) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
The French. Bovary's my biznatch. Boudelaire's my boy.

11) Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?
Shakespeare.

12) Austen or Eliot?
Austen.

13) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Well, I don't do biographies or autobiographies, and sometimes, I choose to ignore major award winners and Sallie Tisdale's advice.

14) What is your favorite novel?
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. See #8.

15) Play?
"Baby with the Bathwater", Christopher Durang

16) Poem?
How about top 5- in descending order- "Dream Song 14" by John Berryman, "What Narcissism Means to Me" by Tony Hoagland, "La Beauté" by Charles Baudelaire, "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" by Gerald Manley Hopkins , and the clear favorite "On Living" by Nazim Hikmet.

17) Essay?
"A Room of One's Own"- you saw it coming.

18) Short Story?
"Hands" by Sherwood Anderson from the perfect Winesburg, Ohio or "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" by Stephen Crane.

19) Non-Fiction?
Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

20) Graphic Novel?
Sandman by Neil Gaiman.

21) Memoir?
*tumble weeds pass* I only like to read my friends' diaries, the more embarrassing the point in adolescence, the better.

22) History?
The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

23) Mystery Or Noir?
Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot ftw.

24) Science Fiction?
Farnham's Freehold, Robert Heinlein

25) Who is your favorite writer?
When I read Italo Calvino, I feel like he wrote just for me.

26) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
William T. Vollmann. I despise gloomy self-indulgence, and I will fight it to the last.

27) What are you reading right now?
I'm in the final throws of The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell.

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