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.

Hero of the Week

I'm in the midst of reading The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. It's a series of stories, connected musings, on the impact of puritan ideology in America. She kind of sloughs through the usual fear/hatred of our bodies, witch hunts as the original national pastime, and the Christian nation tracts in favor of a more thorough examination of the idea of what our puritan legacy really is. She argues it's the notion of the "city on the hill," verbosity, and public education. That's all good and fine. I love her points, but I love her tangents more.
Sarah Vowell, incidentally, is not my hero of the week. But she does get points for introducing me to Chief Osceola of the Seminole people. How did Osceola snag this dubious honor? When he rejected Andrew Jackson's relocation plan, veiled as the Treaty of Payne's Landing, he stabbed it through with a knife. Other chiefs of higher seniority had signed and agreed to move the Seminoles from their native Florida to Oklahoma. It sounded like a bad deal to Osceola. So he led the resistance until he died, captured in a federal prison, of malaria. His objection to Jackson's treaty, apart from the obvious, came because of Jackson's pro-slavery stance. Married to a black woman, and well aware of white perceptions of natives, Osceola was far from keen on giving Jackson anything.

It takes a specific kind of badass to stab a treaty. My friend, May, once claimed that if she could travel back in time only once, it would be to punch Andrew Jackson in the face. I'd like to travel back in time to be Osceola's best friend.

Darcy vs. Zombie vs. Predator

Elizabeth Bennet is having a hot year.

And remember when we found out in American history that two dudes had invented the modern sewing machine simultaneously? Well, wait for it, Mr. Darcy is The Predator.



It's like I fell into an alternate dimension where everything is tailored to my specifications.