A mishmash of memes

[eye_of_a_cat]

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
I'm guessing this is in the sense of being a member of the resistance and picking one book to memorise and therefore become, right? In which case I'm cheating a bit and going with Romeo and Juliet, because I could never imagine not being happy to have this in my head. (The (slightly inaccurate) words in my icon are from my favourite lines ever written, spoken by Juliet:

"Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Er, are there people who haven't? Yes, ever since being madly in love with Aragorn when I was ten.

The last book you bought is:
Because I shouldn't be allowed near bookshops without supervision, it was quite a few. Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, a collection of ghost stories by J. Sheridan LeFanu, a much-battered secondhand book of Greek myths, and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. The secondhand bookshop nearest to where I live is run on the Dylan-Moran-in-Black-Books school of business, and contains huge disorganised stacks, signs everywhere warning you not to disturb the stacks (so you can't find out what's in them), and an owner who sighs theatrically every time a customer walks in. I love it.

The last book you read:
Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which I was teaching a couple of weeks ago. (Surprisingly enough, only one of the students spelt his name 'Salmon' in their essays.)

What are you currently reading?
A book on 'Heaven, Hell and the Victorians', lost somewhere in the chaos of my desk.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
'How To Whittle A Motorised Canoe Out Of Sand And Palm Trees', because I'm not planning on staying there very long if I only get to take five books. Failing that:
1. J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which I've never stopped loving
2. Trying to whittle the sci-fi choices down to one: either Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (which should have been published as Tiger, Tiger, but that's a grumble for another day), or Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
3. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, for all its wonderful disturbing genius.
4. Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men In A Boat - if the deserted island was a pleasant place to be, then I'd adore the chance of reading this in peace and quiet again, and if it wasn't then this book could make it bearable
5. Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Dinosaurs, Victorians, Professor Challenger and a pterodactyl in London.

What was your favorite book as a child?
I can't pick one now, and I definitely couldn't have picked one then. Either The Hobbit, or E. Nesbit's Five Children and It, or anything by Alan Garner. (I'd still recommend his books to anyone who's not read them; he writes fiction about the structures of myths being repeated and held in the landscape, which is a lot more interesting than I probably just made it sound and is said a lot better here. Also, the landscape he usually writes about is the one I grew up with, and I was even more in love with his books because of that.)

How quickly do you read?
Really fast, leading to lifelong accusations of skipping bits. Assuming it's not a critical work I have to make lots of notes on, and depending on the book itself otherwise, I generally read about 100 pages per hour.

Do you judge a book by its cover?
Yes, a great deal. Life is too short to spend reading bad books, and covers are quite often a good indication of whether I'll like it or not - probably not if there's lots of primary colours, or lots of pastel colours, or lots of pink, or those really irritating fonts that think they're being quirky and interesting, or...

Yes. Yes, I do.

How do you organise your books?
Ideally, work-related books are in my office or on the bookshelf in my study downstairs, arranged by shelf into categories based on what kind of fiction they are or what kind of criticism they are, and non-work-related books are in shelves in my bedroom. In reality, this system lasts for about three days and then they're all in heaps and stacks all over the house.

What's your favourite opening line of a novel?
"All children, except one, grow up."

Comments

[melpemone.livejournal.com]

I generally read about 100 pages per hour.

*sigh* I sure wish you'd read Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix at the same time I did. Some 800 pages, I finished it in just over 7 hours, and then I had to wait and wait for someone else to finish so I could talk about it. Damn frustrating. :-)

[eye-of-a-cat.livejournal.com]

When the next one's released, we can spoiler everyone by revealing that Harry was Keyser Soze all along work something out with timezones...

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Harry as Keyser Soze ... hmmm ... That would be an interesting crossover!

I've got no idea what my answers to most of these questions would be. I'm not even sure whether I had a crush on Aragorn or not - I think I wanted to be him more than I wanted to drag him off to the altar/undergrowth/romantic rescue scene. I do share your love of Three Men in a Boat, though. Have you read the sequels?

And I'm really quite tickled by the idea of 'Salmon' Rushdie. Quite appropriate for the Sea of Stories, but what would happen to the other books? Imaginary Haddocks? East, Wrasse? The Trout Beneath Her Feet?

[saraswathi-rani.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's Hydrangea. I'm deleting my old hydrangea777 account. Could you refriend me? *puppy eyes*