From Language Hat comes a fun list of questions:
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Either James Joyce’s Ulysses (because I’d be forced to remember all those beautiful passages that spill out of my memory like too much Two Buck Chuck poured into my glass) or James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, because you need a little lust and murder to filter down to the next generation.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Speaking of Cain, I’ve always had a strange desire to be double-crossed by Phylis Nirdlinger. I had a crush on Vanity Fair‘s Becky Sharp and wondered as a boy if Nancy Drew ever put out.
The last book you bought is?
Just the other day: My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk and A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipul. (I know, I know. Catching up for porous deficiencies.)
What are you currently reading?
The Art of Eating by MFK Fisher, Great Apes by Will Self, Saturday by Ian McEwan.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
Today:
1. The Recognitions by William Gaddis
2. Don Quixote by Cervantes
3. A Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
4. The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin
5. A Rememberance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Many of these have been selected for pragmatic reasons.
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
We’re not running a relay race, are we?
“Many of these have been selected for pragmatic reasons.”
But if you had Catcher in the Rye out there all by yourself, no society, pretty soon you’d be moping, “… well I guess I’M the fuckin’ fony …”
Total bummer, Dr M.
bky: Not at all! Reading about the phonies and the artifices of the world I’m no longer in will replenish my natural curiosity about such things and motivate me further to develop an escape plan to get off the island, lest I start calling a soccer ball “Wilson.” You see, it’s all about pragmatism in the end. 🙂