Book Meme

I'm playing the Book Meme that's going around -- I got it from Pandagon, where I'm been getting nearly everything these days:

http://www.pandagon.net/


You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be [saved]?

See, now, normally my response is Middlemarch, but no way could I memorize that sucker. (Don’t we have to memorize the books in F-451?) Maybe It Can’t Happen Here instead. (Or am I just saying that because it’s happening here? Yes, probably.)

Well, what about Le Guin’s The Dispossessed? Yes, I think I’d be/save that one. It would be a bear to memorize, but I would love to have it in my head, so yeah. I’d go for that.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Oh, every week. Will Ladislaw, last month, when I was teaching Middlemarch for the tenth time. I had a deep and wild crush on the private detective Jackson Brodie in Kate Atkinson’s novel Case Histories (which is pretty good, BTW, have a look at it if you have time) that lasted about a month. And of course, as a kid, all I ever loved were people in books. Why else would I be doing what I do?

The last book you bought is?

Fiction or non-fiction? Yesterday I bought a second-hand copy, online from Alibris, of In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker, so I guess that’s the last book I bought. Right before that I bought Anne Lamott’s Plan B. I bought some critical stuff in Indianapolis for a paper I might be working on and we bought that book by Sarah Vowell on CD to listen to, Assassianation Vacation…I don’t buy clothes or furniture or shoes or lunch out or a decent car (as you’ll remember from my lengthy whine a few weeks back) but I do buy books. Sigh.

What are you currently reading?

For teaching purposes: Dracula and Paradise Lost. For my own amusement, Kage Baker (her complete oeuvre) and John Varley, The Golden Globe. Well, we can also call these last two research – I’m going to teach a science fiction class this summer: so I need to be reading in the field. Right? Right?

Five books you would take to a deserted island?

God. Five? Only five?

I wouldn’t go. Sorry. Book someone else.

In case the above hasn’t made it clear, I’m a book junkie. I have cards to three different libraries in the area and I visit them all at least once every week. (I pay fees for two of them because I don’t live in their counties – did you know you can do that? You can. It’s only $25.00 a year, which is a bargain, really.) When I get down to only three books in the house that I haven’t read, actual panic sets in. Hyper focus and dry mouth and fury: I have to get to a library – or, failing that, a bookstore – NOW. (Fort Smith, I might add, has no actual bookstore. A Books-A-Million, and, to give its owners credit, the best Books-A-Million I have ever been in, but, uh, really that’s not saying much; and a Hastings, ditto and ditto; and a tiny tiny Walden in our lame, lame mall.)

Anyway, if I can’t have a large and well-stocked library on my deserted island, along with UPS service so that I can order new books on a regular basis, is what I’m saying, bugger off.