via the mysteron, a literary meme, which i'm using to kick start my new month's resolution of posting more often, as well as to remind you of the imminent relaunch of the fifty two book challenge.... coming soon to a blog near you...
incidentally, to avoid confusion, i'm answering all the questions that appeared variously in this meme all at once, amazingly enough!
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
oh yes. several. this obviously makes me a bit of a sad-case, but in my defence... no i don't really have a defence, except maybe to say that i was young and hormonal at the time (luckily i've avoided literary crushes in recent years)... let me see..., not rochester or darcy at least... there was definitely simon in lord of the flies, which may be a little obscure (and may have also had more to do with seeing it performed by a load of boys about my age in stratford one summer, than actually reading the book)... that's the only one that's coming to me at the moment. perhaps more will occur to me later.
The last book you bought is?
high rise by jg ballard, for the book group (incidentally, if any of you london based lot want to join, our next meeting's tuesday 10th, email me for details) i promptly poured coke all over it, so it has that attractive sticky vintage look to it... mmmm.
The last book you finished is
er, it was harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban. a re-read. because i love potter. dammit. as long as i also read grown-up books for grown-up people, i'm allowed to love potter. also, i'm allowed to reasonably like harry and the potters, because i listen to proper grown-up music like anthony and the johnsons (d'you see what i did there).
What are you currently reading?
if you assumed that i was too lazy to update the currently reading section on the left hand side of the screen, which has read strange and norrell for about two months, you would be wrong. i have really been reading it that long. i'm currently about half-way through it. i have but one response so far: "this woman needs a fucking editor." i can't even tell if it's any good, because it's so fucking long. ahem.
You're inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book would you burn?
erm... it would probably be 'far from the maddening crowd', which i was supposed to read for gcse english, and which is number one on the 'books that were too awful to read' list i keep. number two is ralph's party by lisa jewell, chicklit of the lowest order, which tom paulin inexplicably loved. just another reason i'm glad i didn't go to oxford.
Five books you would take to a desert island?
- um... the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay. regular readers will know this is my favourite book of all time. so that was a pretty obvious choice.
- edie - american girl, because i suppose you'd get a bit lonely on a desert island, but because it's a sort of oral biography, you might feel they were all there.
- complete works of oscar wilde, because wilde is a perfect pick-me-up for mean red days.
- perhaps i should take a leaf out of jarvis' book here (he picked the theme from robinson crusoe as his first desert island disc), i think i might take the swiss family robinson - it was one of my favourite books when i was a child, and i'm pretty sure it's chock full of good advice for desert island survival. though they have the advantage of being shipwrecked, so they can save things like the goat.
- and finally, i choose the book i refer to most often, the fabulous girl's guide to decorum, to make sure i kept my behaviour decorous, in case a ship did come to rescue me.
Which book would you memorise if you were on a desert island?i'm not convinced this would be a particularly fruitful exercise, but i suppose it would pass the time. so what i would memorise would be the complete works of shakespeare. then i could act it out on my island. with only the goat to see my world-beating performance of king lear. really.
Who are you going to pass this stick to (three people) and why?this is the bit i don't like about memes, because it feels a bit presumptuous to tell people what to write about on their own blogs. but i'll risk it anyway, and so the baton goes to:
archel, because she pretty well eats, sleeps and breathes books. that may not be true actually... but she reads a lot of books... and also works in a library.
laura, whose new look is extremely fab. for much the same reason. except replace library with librarie (that's bookshop in french... i hope).
...oh heck, i've managed to only find two people i think might be interested... if you want to take the stick, leave a comment...
