One book meme, doubled.
Whatever, like I could decide on *just one* book for anything. Just two is hard enough. Plus, I think Lucy and Happy Feminist both tagged me, so it’s just like doing this twice.
1. Two books that changed your life?
I’ll go silly, and say The Autobiography of King Henry VIII, with Notes by his Fool, Will Somers, because it got me the only 100% I ever got in history in high school. (I had a very demanding teacher, who wrote very hard tests, and who was universally thought to be one of the best in the school.) Also, I love that book.
Jane Eyre, which my mother read to me during our reading at bedtime renaissance (along with The Wind in the Willows, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, To Kill a Mockingbird, East of Eden, and the beginning of The Once and Future King, which I finished myself, a bit later). It was the book which moved me from children’s literature to adult’s. (I still read kid and young adult lit, of course, but now I read both.
2. Two books you have read more than once?
Harder to do two books I *haven’t*. How about The Westing Game and One True Thing.
3. Two books you would want on a desert island?
Can it be something like ‘The Books of Jane Austen‘? Those are (a) long and (b) many and (c) rereadable. Otherwise, probably the entire Bible — I’m never going to read it all otherwise — and the collected works of Borges.
4. Two books that made you laugh?
Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair (a lot, while in a bookstore). Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris.
5. Two books that made you cry?
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, and The Time Traveller’s Wife, by Audrey Niffe-whatever. (Tania Kindersley’s Don’t Ask Me Why was my third answer. Because I am double-cheating.)
6. Two books you wish had been written?
Harry Potter 7? (It will be, but I’d like for it to already have been. Clever, no? Totally not cheating.)
And, while I’m being unoriginal, whatever she writes next, cause I’m just sort of curious and can’t think of anything else.
7. Two books you wish had never been written?
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Celestine Prophecy. For different reasons, of course, but really, I despised The Celestine Prophecy, and even more when I realised people I knew were taking it seriously. (No links.)
8. One book you are currently reading?
Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears.
9. Two books you have been meaning to read?
One hundred years of solitude. Orlando.
Everyone else has done this, I think.
September 2nd, 2006 at 8:11 am
oh, I am with you on a Prayer for Owen Meany. I really liked that book and I just blubbed like a little kid when I got to the end. Have you seen the movie based on it? That one made me cry, too.