10 Titles

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Stranger by Albert Camus
 Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1 edited by Robert Silverberg

A-Z Bookish Survey

A-Z Bookish Survey

AUTHOR YOU’VE READ THE MOST BOOKS FROM:

It's a little bit embarrassing to me because I have a hard time reading his novels now. When I was 10-12, Piers Anthony was the greatest. I read 15+ Xanth books, the Tarot books, 7 Apprentice Adept books, 7 Incarnations of Immortality books, and a few standalone titles.

BEST SEQUEL EVER:

Earthquake Weather. It is satisfying as a sequel to both Last Call and Expiration Date.

CURRENTLY READING:

Empire by Clifford D. Simak

DRINK OF CHOICE WHILE READING:

Depends when I’m reading. In the morning, coffee. Before bed, I’m probably either drinking black & tan or lime seltzer.

E-READER OR PHYSICAL BOOK:

Physical book. I’ve tried and tried to embrace the e-reader and can’t do it.

FICTIONAL CHARACTER YOU PROBABLY WOULD HAVE ACTUALLY DATED IN HIGH SCHOOL:

Um, this is a silly question. I don’t know.

GLAD YOU GAVE THIS BOOK A CHANCE:

The Folly of the World by Jesse Bullington. I bought it based on the cover art. I’m still a little ashamed by its relentless naughtiness, but its emotional impact has stuck with me long after the memories of many other novels have faded.

HIDDEN GEM BOOK:

The Mystery of the Giant Footprints by Fernando Krahn

Karhn's wordless children's picture books are unjustly out of print. This one made me laugh out loud.

IMPORTANT MOMENT IN YOUR READING LIFE:

Finding a copy of Breakfast of Champions on a table at the Center Moriches library.

JUST FINISHED:

A Land More Kind than Home by Wiley Cash

KIND OF BOOKS YOU WON’T READ:

I don't know. I like all kinds. I generally avoid romance, but I'd make exceptions and read the worst looking Fabio-covered trash if someone I trust recommends it to me.

 

LONGEST BOOK I’VE READ:

Probably Lord of the Rings.

MAJOR BOOK HANGOVER BECAUSE OF:

I'm still recovering from the oppressive bleakness of Fred Chappell's Dagon.

 

NUMBER OF BOOKCASES YOU OWN:

Fourteen, not counting other shelving for books.

ONE BOOK YOU HAVE READ MULTIPLE TIMES:

Knights of the Cornerstone by James P. Blaylock. This is a current “comfort book” for me. It makes me feel good.

PREFERRED PLACE TO READ:

Bed, couch, floor, toilet. Not necessarily in that order.

QUOTE THAT INSPIRES/GIVES THE FEELS:

"And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle." -Kurt Vonnegut

 

READING REGRET:

Unfinished series: The Wheel of Time. The Dark Tower. All 300 issues of Cerebus. I hope to return to and finish each of these before I die.

SERIES YOU STARTED AND NEED TO FINISH:

See reading regret above.

THREE OF YOUR ALL TIME FAVOURITE BOOKS:

Treasure Island

Macbeth

The Stranger

 

UNAPOLOGETIC FAN FOR:

Golden Age SF

VERY EXCITED FOR THIS RELEASE:

The Man Who Made Models: The Collected Short Fiction by R.A. Lafferty

WORST BOOKISH HABIT:

Spending more time reading blogs/book news than reading books

X MARKS THE SPOT: START AT TOP LEFT AND PICK THE 27TH BOOK ON YOUR SHELF:

Oversight: Short Stories 1990-2005 by Phillip Hester

 

YOUR LATEST BOOK PURCHASE:

A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson

 

ZZZ-SNATCHER BOOK:

I've been reading Strahan's Year's Best 6 before bed, off and on, for months now.

READY FOR THE NEW WORLD

Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.
-G.K. Chesterton, from "Babies and Distributism"

AS A JOLLY HUNTSMAN

Dickens:
There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it; he must not rush into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head; smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else.

There was a fine gentle wind, and Mr. Pickwick's hat rolled sportively before it. The wind puffed, and Mr. Pickwick puffed, and the hat rolled over and over as merrily as a lively porpoise in a strong tide: and on it might have rolled, far beyond Mr. Pickwick's reach, had not its course been providentially stopped, just as that gentleman was on the point of resigning it to its fate.

Chesterton:
For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic - eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing - such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife. 

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder. 

SAFELY WRITTEN DOWN

Clive James:

Looking back through these pages, I catch myself in a posture about the “Ode on Melancholy.” Like any other work of literature, it is my favorite only when I am reading it. One of the characteristics of a work of art is to drive all the other works of art temporarily out of your head. If comparisons come flooding in, it means that the work’s air of authority is a sham. No such fears with the “Ode on Melancholy,” which, at the time I first went mad about it, I could recite from memory—well, almost. In the matter of memorization, length sets severe limits. Hence the absurdity in the final scene of the movie Truffaut made out of Ray Bradbury’s supposedly prophetic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. People walk around in the forest reciting Anna Karenina, etc. A nice idea, but wishful thinking, even when applied to poems. In the old Soviet Union, where, for obvious reasons, there was a great emphasis on memorizing contemporary poems, the manuscript still counted. People remembered things only until they could get them safely written down.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/244758

AN ABIDING STRANGENESS

If some fatal progress of applied science ever enables us in fact to reach the Moon, that real journey will not at all satisfy the impulse which we now seek to gratify by writing such stories. The real Moon, if you could reach it and survive, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else. You would find cold, hunger, hardship and danger; and after the first few hours they would be simply cold, hunger hardship and danger as you might have met on earth. And death would be simply death among those bleached craters as it is simply death in a nursing home at Sheffield. No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden. -C.S. Lewis

A WORLD OF DELIGHTS

Medieval towns were not organized on a grid or with avenues radiating symmetrically from a center. They were organized theologically, divided up according to the Seven Virtues, or the Twelve Apostles, or the Ten Commandments. Their labyrinthine streets were designed to teach spiritual lessons.
I get a little thrill when I learn tidbits like that, but where does the thrill come from? There is some vertigo in it: the dizzying sense that my world is more precarious than it seems, like standing on a fragile bridge with nothing, but nothing, stretching far, far below.
It's also the thrill of encountering a world other than mine. History is a bore to many, but history well told is as exciting as an absorbing fiction. It's like handling the gizmos of science fiction or meeting the beasts of fantasy. It's a world of delights all the more delicious because it is my world, younger.
And it's the thrill of the future, because if the world was once very different, it will be yet again.

Leithart, Peter. “Delightful History.” Touchstone Mag. March/April 2012:
        6. Print.