The Reading Meme

I’ve been memed! By Richard Lawrence Cohen! Normally I don’t do meme-extracted confessionals, but here goes…

THE READING MEME

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

While my memory would have to improve vastly, I would like to be able to preserve and pass onto ages of less Dark Ages Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Now I don’t speak French, but the unexpurgated French edition is the one I’d have to memorize. Even though I don’t agree with all her ideas, I think her massive history of everything about how females are made, not born, is one of those pivotal books that only come along once in a long while. Beauvoir, I tip my glass of wine to you…

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

There must be one somewhere…

3. The last book you bought was...?

A few days ago I purchased The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene at a used bookstore on Commercial Drive. I’ve been lusting after this book for some time, Chapters being out of stock when I last tried to order it. That it had just come in when I walked into the store and bought it is one of those wonderful coincidences that I don’t make as much of as Jung would have.

4. The last book you read was...?

Luminous Emptiness: Understanding the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Francesca Fremantle, from the library. Last November I participated in NaNoWrMo, and wrote a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, a breathtaking experience. Anyway, as the month began I was working in the back offices of a funeral home, specifically in the vault that contains all the hand-written ledgers of the details of the funerary services and final resting places of the departed. The ledgers were amazing documents, and I considered them a modern “Book of the Dead,” and because they were essentially financial records was able to throw a lot of stuff on capitalism into the novel (believing that Capitalism is the “root philosophy” of our culture). So thus began my novel… anyway I had ANI from the Egyptian Book of the Dead appear as a mysterious blogger at one point, and included an otherworld journey based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead towards the end of my novel. Reading Fremantle’s book was just more research on the Bardo Thodol (she has some beautiful, lyrical passages but overall I found her thought too judgmental and rigid for my liking)…

5. What are you currently reading?

The Elegant Universe, and I’m loving it… O, those hidden dimensions, and those dancing, sweet, lyrical strings vibrating… always thought music was the highest art form, agree with Pound, et al, and now, seems, yes, vibrating coils in 11 dimensions are potentially the basis of all matter and thus a prime candidate for Einstein’s beloved unified field theory…

Sigh, okay, like any bibliophile, there are others in varying stages: Being Bodies by Lenore Friedman and Susan Moon, Fruitflesh by Gayle Brandeis, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was by Wendy Doniger, Selected Plays of Helene Cixous, edited by Eric Prenowitz, and, uhmm...

6. Five books you would take to a desert island...

Pl-ease, do you know how complicated this is? I take it seriously. Whatever I say I may indeed have to take with me to an imprisonment on a desert island. Okay, so I’m heavily into Norton’s on the desert island sojourn. Sorry! While it’s only blurbs, and that would be frustrating, I’d have to remember everything else I read from those snippets, and that’d keep me occupied, wouldn’t it, wouldn’t it?

-Norton Anthology of Literature
-Norton Anthology of Poetry
-Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
-Riverside Shakespeare
-Elegant Universe (can’t leave unfinished book behind yet!)
-and some Helene Cixous…O, maybe Promethea, I don’t know

That's 6, but...it's not enough!

And please, can I take the Internet with me? A wireless satellite connection? And some way to recharge my laptop batteries? Pl-ease…

7. Who are you passing this stick on to and why?

thenarrator, cause he’s my friend.
MoreWhereThatCameFrom, cause he’s too mysterious.
laurieglynn, cause she’s too mysterious too.
Lord Pineapple, cause I'm curious.