On the shelf

Since I have never quite gotten around to actually telling anyone I was doing this - largely because I suspected (as seen below) that I would never be able to keep it up - I have taken the liberty of tagging myself with a meme from Anni's wonderful website. Because I like books. And lists. Both of which you have undoubtedly spotted by now.

So here we are.

1. One book that changed your life
At this point, right at the start, I really ought to say the Bible. But since it's been a part of my life since the year dot, I'm sorry to say that it doesn't always feel like that. Come on people, I was a Sunday School nerd. I got attendance awards and end-of-year prizes and everything. And I beat the other teacher's son in a verse race. Ha! (Now, if that's not a particularly virulent outburst of Vainglory, for all you WAMmers out there, what is?)
Studying Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion at school introduced me to Phenomenology, a wonderful theory of ideas that put into words a lot of ideas I'd had but had never been able to describe properly. Infinite subjectivity may be old hat to everyone who grew up with Levi-Strauss on their bookshelves, but I still like it.

2. One book you've read more than once
Only one?!!!!
Richard Llewellyn's How Green was my Valley is one of my all-time favourites. And not just because I like seeing my name in print. The prose has such a lovely limpid flow. Where oh where has my copy gone? It took me years to find it!

3. One book you'd want on a desert island
The Complete Works of Dickens. Or Shakespeare. Or Oscar Wilde. Anything good and fat with the whole world inside.

4. One book that made you giddy
Now, is that supposed to be giggling giddy or head-spinning giddy? Because I read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince in three and a half hours and I can tell you that being alone in a silent house after that made me feel that my brain was about to melt.
In the middle of the continuum is William Goldman's The Princess Bride - if anyone can tell me where the truth stops and the postmodernism starts, I'd be grateful.
And on the lighter end of things is A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh; it's not always laugh-out-loud but never fails to keep me smiling.

5. One book that wracked you with sobs
I wouldn't call it wracked, exactly, but I always cry in Little Women when Beth dies. And likewise in the Anne series for Ruby Gillis. Characters who die young always leave me with a bitter resentment towards those who go on in the next chapter as though nothing had ever happened.

6. One book that you wish had been written
I wish there were a better biography of French composer Germaine Tailleferre available. Her music is sweet enough, if not exactly spellbinding, but she had a remarkable life - friends with Coco Chanel, someone significant (Stravinsky?) described her as "his musical daughter", her husband attempted to shoot her while she was pregnant... a very operatic life! The only one that I've found was disastrous, to say the least. I'd also like a nice colourful biography of whatshername, another French woman - the one with the red hair that most of the artistic community of Paris was madly in love with. But that's because I'm an old sook, I suppose.

7. One book that you wish had never been written
I had great difficulty with Flaubert's Madame Bovary - the main character swallows arsenic and dies in agony, her death throes are described in detail over several pages, and yet it's dull. Honestly.

8. One book you're currently reading
I've had a lovely time in the past few weeks, investing in and reading books. It's a wonderful feeling to have new books around, I haven't done it in ages. In order of reading, they have been Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, Zadie Smith's On Beauty, and I'm just about to start Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind. Yes, I know that's a lot more than one, but my mind is full of them. And yet, strangely enough, having so many stories inside seems to make me more like myself, and less like a moth trapped between the pages, which is my usual state while reading. Strange.

9. One book you've been meaning to read
Every time I go to get Catch 22 from the library it seems to be out. I'd also like to become better acquainted with the Arabian Nights (Rimsky-Korsakov has made me fall in love with Sheherazade)... Apparently Karlheinz Stockhausen used to discuss Adorno's Negative Dialectics with his friends on the train on the way to school, so that's a challenge to crash-tackle!

10. Now tag 5 bloggers
Gracious, do I even know 5 bloggers? I suppose I can re-tag Anni again (it's a bit like ping-pong for her) and also Dennis (who had his garden variant of this from Anni), and John's terribly amusing effort (make sure you visit the colours that Derwent rejected while you're there. I'm rather fond of Baby Navy).