More Book Talk!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Speaking of books! I stole this from tay421. I couldn’t limit most of my answers to just one book, but it was the best a bibliophile could do.


1) What author do you own the most books by?
An interesting question—I’m not entirely sure what it’s meant to measure, since Terry Pratchett has written WAY more books than, say, Stephen Hawking, but I’m a fan of both. Add to that my tendency to read Giant Epics, and it’d be a list. I have large numbers of books by Pterry, David Eddings, Tamora Pierce, Roald Dahl, Dave Barry, and of course Marissa Moss.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Probably The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, since my brother and I keep getting each other copies.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
No. That’s an antiquated notion introduced by somebody who thought English should be more like Latin, whose grammar makes preposition-ending impossible. English grammar allows it, despite what other know-it-alls may tell you.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
SECRETLY? That’s hard. Pretty much everyone knows of my undying love for Hank McCoy. Perhaps less widely known is my desire to be Sherlock Holmes’s nonromantic companion …

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?
Possibly A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I reread it every Christmas. Though Roald Dahl’s Matilda is up there, too. (What? I started both of those young.)

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old.
Now the lack of question mark does bother me. Also, pick a favorite book? I couldn’t do that back then, either. Although I was fond of Bruce Coville’s Book of Aliens, though that was more of a short story collection. Also, JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
You know, someday I will tell you all about these awesome “Tea Shop Mysteries” my dad got me on account of I like books and tea. Oh, how they cry out to be sporked.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Either Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men, although comparing them presents a lot of difficulty.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Force? No. But if I could be guaranteed everyone would read it, I would go with Mark Twain’s Letters From The Earth. I really wish he’d finished that.


10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
Meh.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
A lot of the books I like don’t make very good movie material. Maybe The Fairy Rebel, or Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher. Also, I am dying to see The Hobbit. Alas that Ian Holm is too old to play Bilbo.

I also demand a do-over of The Golden Compass. This time with the ENDING.

Ooh, or you know what would make a good movie? Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted. Why, they could show her budding romance with Char and her struggle with the curse and the way she always comes out on top with her cleverness despite her curse and they SURE WOULDN’T MAKE IT SOME BULLSHIT ANNE HATHAWAY VEHICLE WHERE ALL THE PEOPLE WERE CARICATURES OF THEMSELVES AND IT ONLY VAGUELY RESEMBLED THE BOOK IN CHARACTER NAMES AND CURSE STORY BUT THEN INSTEAD OF THE COOL STORY ABOUT ELLA AS A STRONG CHARACTER DEMONSTRATING WITS AND SPUNK AND ALL THAT THEY DECIDE TO DO A BUNCH OF TOTALLY STUPID EXTRANEOUS FUCKING SHIT WHERE THE FAIRY TALE CREATURES ARE ENSLAVED BY CARY ELWES AND HE LIKE FRAMES HER FOR MURDER OR SOMETHING BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE TOTALLY STUPID AND NOBODY IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD DO THAT.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Eragon. Unfortunately, it is too late for that. I also would panic if anyone tried to do a Tamora Pierce book, because they would undoubtedly fail like they did those books I bitched about up there.

NO SERIOUSLY, HOW DO YOU FAIL AT ELLA ENCHANTED?

*ahem*

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
Well, just recently Daja Kisubo saved Q from an asteroid attack by punching that motherfucker back into space. (The asteroid, I mean, though Q probably deserved it too.) Hey, she is a fire and metal mage. Also, they lived in a water world and she had to keep herself awake by singing or Q, who is an ungrateful bastard, would steal her soul. It was pretty weird.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
Those Tea Shop Books. I’d say Twilight, but I never made it past chapter 2.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Probably Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban. For obvious reasons.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
Well, I put on A Comedy of Errors with my class in elementary school—does that count? Also, I want to see Titus Andronicus, because that is not Shakespeare crossing the line. That is Shakespeare jumping the line and twelve schoolbuses on a flaming motorcycle in a studded leather jacket while flipping off the audience with one hand and biting the head off of a chicken with the other.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Depends on which French and which Russians.

18) Roth or Updike?
Blagh.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Dave Barry.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Chaucer.

21) Austen or Eliot?
Austen.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I have read Dragonlance stories. That is more embarrassing than a gap.

23) What is your favorite novel?
That’s a huge list, so I’ll toss a couple darts at it and say Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens and To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

24) Play?
Anything by Ibsen. He cracks me up so much.

25) Poem?
Not much for poetry, but Keats’s “Autumn” is at the top of the short list. Not to mention anything by Shel Silverstein.

26) Essay?
It’s a tie between “The Awful German Language” by Mark Twain, the essay by Dave Barry that may have a title but which I always just call “Roger and Elaine,” and anything in the Life, The Universe, And Everything sections of The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams.

27) Short story?
Damon Knight’s “To Serve Man” may not make much linguistic sense, but it has the greatest last line in any story or novel ever.

28) Work of nonfiction?
Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and the odd one out, Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens by Pat Duffy. It’s not quite so sweeping as the first two, and not very well written, but it was a bit of a revelation for me.

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Me! (I can’t choose, but I am working on the “writer” part and I do quite like myself …)

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
I wanted to say “Shakespeare” and then I saw that “alive” part. I guess that means “Faulkner” wouldn’t work either. (Seriously, why is that guy famous?) So I’ll have to go with Stephenie Meyer.

31) What is your desert island book?
A giant anthology of Sherlock Holmes stories. Although a book on How To Live On A Desert Island might work.

32) And... what are you reading right now?
My f-list, frankly, but I’m working through Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, the Immortals quartet by Tamora Pierce, and Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay.

Comments

[nobleplatypus]

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher would make an AWESOME movie.

Also, The Immortals quartet is my favorite, hands down. One of these days I am going to get up early and just read the whole flipping thing in one day.

[tay421.livejournal.com]

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher would make an AWESOME movie.

THIS. I completely forgot about that book. I loved it when I read it in school, enough to read it a second time, now that I think about it, and I'm not even a big dragon fan.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

INORITE. I nominate poor typecast Wally Shawn as Mr. Kravitz. That's who plays him in my head.

I love book binges! Enjoy yours!

[neintales.livejournal.com]

...curse you. When I get home I am going to be tearing my bookshelves APART to see if I still have the Fairy Rebel, and if I do not, I am going to wind up then tearing apart the bookstore for it, and since they likely won't have it, I will wind up ordering it and having to figure out where, after my bead expenditure today, I will get the money by the time it arrives in town.

(I could go to the library and get on a list there for it, but dammit, if I have lost my original copy of it, I will have to PERMANENTLY replace it as it rocks.)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I used to check out a really awesome edition from the library that had this dark, almost threatening cover art on it of the menacing Queen, with a wan Tiki hovering before her. It was awesome, but the version I bought is a paperback with a much more standard cover art. I still miss that library book.

[bluetara2020.livejournal.com]

This has given me much to think about...

[neintales.livejournal.com]

Oh! And today at the art school conference I am attending there was a brief talk by a clinical psychologist about the neurological aspects of creativity and the ways creativity can be stimulated by travel in particular. It was pretty nifty, and made me think of you and another LJ friend of mine just for the sheer Science!! of it. (Also made me try to remember if your dad was a neurospecialist of some sort or if I was misremembering)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'd be interested in learning more--that always fascinates me.

(And yes, he's a neurosurgeon.)

[xaandria.livejournal.com]

Dude, Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher was my very first fantasy novel EVAR. It holds a special place in my heart.

It was also the first book to make me cry, although that WAS the book-on-tape version and the voice actors were particularly good at it, so the ending was fairly emotional.

(You might enjoy the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik, if you liked JT,DH.)

Also: Yay Wee Free Men.

That is all. I have nothing else of value to provide.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I loved it for that. The ending was emotional on paper, too!

I'll check on Temeraire.

The Nac Mac Feegle were awesome enough, but what totally won me was their way of teaching the cat not to mess with baby birds. "Flappity flap! Oh I am a puir wee burdie ..."

Can I steal your icon?

[xaandria.livejournal.com]

Go for it. Credit to moi.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

There are many, many cases where our tastes don't overlap at all, but I will love you forever for understanding that the people who made THAT MOVIE are going to the special hell.

[madcap-shiny.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, the Ella Enchanted movie was a crime against good taste on many, many levels. *shudders*

Also: The Fairy Rebel! I'd forgotten all about that book until you mentioned it and now I so have to find it again.

And I really need to reread The Immortals quartet, too. I must have read those when I was 9/10/11...? Somewhere in there, and they were completely my favoritest ever.

Shakespeare

[(Anonymous)]

But maybe Shakespeare didn't write Titus Andronicus. Maybe he didn't write any plays. This matter is examined in depth in a new book, The Ignorance Of Shakespeare.

Re: Shakespeare

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a kind of spam I've never seen before!

Re: Shakespeare

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I know! I am trying to figure out whether I prefer this or the Masked Nitpicker who flew in, corrected a typo, and vanished as mysteriously as s/he had appeared. Troll: You're doing it wrong.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Smile, you've been Metaquoted!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

:D

[ursulav.livejournal.com]

I...I...too, read the Dragonlance books, and believe me, I feel shame.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

It's good to get it off one's chest, though, isn't it?

[jesuitfluff.livejournal.com]

My father refers to the author in question as Mister Barry.

#27: AGREE AGREE AGREE

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I KNOW, RIGHT. I DARE anyone to find me a better and more twisted punchline than that.

Darn Twilight Zone version didn't do it justice at all.

[michellerz.livejournal.com]

Seriously, I'm with you here, HOW DOES ONE MESS UP ELLA ENCHANTED??? That was one of the most frustrating movie experiences I've had. >:-/

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

Hi there, linked over from Conlangs, and let me say you have impeccable taste in literature.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Greetings and welcome! *tips hat* I am intrigued by your worldbuilding and conlanging, and you are welcome any time!

[baby-rissa-chan.livejournal.com]

On the basis of this survey, I like your style and would like to Friend you.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Go for it! Glad you like it!

[sanachan1.livejournal.com]

Hi there! I came over here from... actually I don't remember, but I had to pipe up. Those Tea Shop Books, are they the ones with Theodosia something as the heroine? Because I picked a couple up at the library and started reading them last night. Half way through the first chapter I was like "Wait, this book cannot POSSIBLY be as bad as I think it is. It must be a clever joke!" But sadly, a few more pages in, and I'm still not laughing.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

The very same! Although I frankly find them so bad they're comical, so at least they have that going for them. The descriptions are a bit ADD, the expository dialogue is painfully clumsy, the characters are kinda one-dimensional, obvious Mary Sue is obvious, and the weirdsnobbery of the whole series unite to make it almost ... transcendent.

Plus, I get a kick out of the way "Internet" always has a capital I.

[sanachan1.livejournal.com]

I was doing ok despite the weird, slightly squicky, Gone With the Wind-esque setting, and the over the top descriptions. But then she made a comment about "genteel women don't wonder about such things in public!" and I found myself doing a double take. They weren't even discussing anything particularly scandalous, and the character being reprimanded actually blushed like she had done something wrong. I sensed imminent head explosion, so decided to put it down. I'm not sure I could make it through even for the lulz.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

That part actually sorta fascinates and repulses me, too--the inexplicable Southerny propriety that would NEVER occur to me. That was my vague "weird snobbery" above, which does need unpacking. I remember just being sort of puzzled with the first book when she just kept going ON about how she was descended from Historic Colonel Foghorn Leghorn or whoever, and how she lives on an Utterly Charming street in Historic Charleston where they all get together for Traditional Events where everyone makes damn sure to dress nice and if you don't people give you disapproving looks and whisper about you to each other. Although this all may explain the murder rate. I'D want to commit murder if people appeared to make up new ex post facto rules of Propriety I'd just broken.

This series is just CRUISING for a sporking.

[sanachan1.livejournal.com]

What gets me is that underneath all that southern pride and prejudice is an acceptance of a racist, abusive system that built the so called "southern gentility." I know people who try to claim that having pride in your great Confederate ancestry is simply about having some kind of familial loyalty, but to me, it's failing to acknowledge that your family member fought for a brutal, violent, and downright disgusting system that still has re-repercussions in our society today. To me being proud of your great-great-great-whatever, the Confederate so and so is like having pride in your great grandfather the Nazi concentration camp commandant. It's just not something I could be proud of, ever. But in the United States we've glamorized the Old South to such a degree that people forget that the South has a lot of really nasty history, that's pretty damn recent. The whole veneer of Southern-Gentility-and-aren't-we-sweet-have-a-mint-Julep just sets my teeth on edge.

Whoa... sorry, that went a bit past regular book sporking. But thanks for giving me the chance to vocalize what bothered me so much! (Other than the Obvious Mary Sue being Obvious.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

No, no, I fully agree. I am a bit more distanced from it, but that's part of what weirds me out--the fact that people seem either willfully or unwillfully oblivious to some of the problems with the culture.

I also am not a particular family history nut. I had some kinda cool ancestors and some highly unpleasant ones, but I have never quite bothered to put together what real bearing distant ancestors have on ME. Family history is one thing, but pride OR shame just don't seem like a big hairy deal now that there's not a lot to be done to fix the past. I worry more about the future.

Also, I absolutely HATED Gone With The Wind because it's basically a bunch of people whining "Oh, noes, our farm suffers because we have no one here anymore to pick the cotton!" and I think "YES, LIFE SURE IS HARD, ISN'T IT?"

[sanachan1.livejournal.com]

In my younger, more ignorant days I loved Gone With the Wind (the movie, the book was boring as hell) mostly for the costumes. But even at the time I remember thinking Scarlett was a stupid cow, who could really stand to get a clue. I've grown out of that phase, and while I still love the costumes from the movie, and Hattie McDaniel's brilliant performance, the rest of it makes me want to bang my head on something hard.

[nixve.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, I would die and go to heaven if they made a (good) movie out of Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher!! The trailer has been made up and has been in my head since I read the book for the first time!

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

Oh bother it, a meme I actually have to do!!

In fact, come post it over at bookaddiction if you like. Or else, I will.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Say, now, I totally forgot I was going to join that!

Shall I just cross-post it? Be fun to see what we come up with!

(Oh, and if you didn't see it, gwalla posted a highlight reel in metaquotes that ... touched a nerve, it seems. You may find some of the comments pretty entertaining.)

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

I did indeed!