Literary Geek

This has been doing the rounds on facebook. Here are my answers.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Depends on if you include embarrassing stuff from my past, in which case probably Alaistair MacLean or Sven Hassell. If I'm allowed to exclude such horrors, probably Joseph Conrad. Because I'm like that.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Hmmm. Two copies of Nostromo (Conrad, of course), can't think of any others.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Only a little bit. To enthused by the thrill of this quiz to be pedantic. Might even drop an apostrophe or mis-spell something, I'm so excited. My life is very sad.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Marina from Shakespeare's Pericles, because it is such a lovely name. I'd love anyone called Marina, even if they looked like Fungus the Bogeyman. Unless they voted Tory, of course. Some things are Not Acceptable.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)?
Probably Nostromo again, Sorry to be so dull.

6) What was your favourite book when you were ten years old?
Crikey, you don't ask for much, do you? Only 15 years ... um, I remember reading a book called Grimble a lot while I was in primary 5 or 6. A quick internet blast reveals it was written by Clement Freud, who died just the other day. Oh, the humanity!

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
Oh, now you're asking for it. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Or Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maughan. Or Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. Or An AMerican Tragedy, by Threodore Dreiser. Which, unfortunately, happens to be the book I'm reading just now, and I still have about 600 pages to go.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
I had a shit year for books in 2008, absolutely shit. The Death of a President, by William Manchester, abotuthe shooting of JFK, or The North West Passage by George Malcolm Thompson, are the stand outs in an otherwise mediocre selection.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Summer Lightening, by PG Wodehouse, because every needs to be a little bit happier.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
Oh, blimey, you expect me to be able to make a sensible recommendation? I buy books from library sales and second hand stores, I don't know nuffink about modern living writers. Gore Vidal, maybe. Is he still alive? That would piss off the shade of Norman Mailer.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
I'd love to see John Sayles film Nostromo, because he's one of the few directors that might do it properly. Of course, he'd need a budget of a trillion dollars (Hey, Barak, can you sling some of that stimulus package in Sayles's direction?) and he'd probably rather make a film about Guatemalan lesbian basket weavers, anyway. Oh, or something with lots of lurid sex in it. Because I'm that venal.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Nostromo, because it would probably be hopelessly ruined. Yes, I'm aware of the BBC adaptation from a few years back. Lets not talk about it.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I really want to think of an amusing answer to this, but can't.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
The Seventh Scroll by Wilbur Smith. My brain still hasn't forgiven me.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Translated Accounts by James Kelman. My brain still hasn't forgiven me for that, either.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
Pericles.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
The French by a nose. The Russians might have sneaked it, but for the samovars. They are forever doing things with Samovars, and I'm not entirely sure what one is. I imagine a furry animal, similar to a small domesticated bear, though they appear to produce tea, so maybe it is a species of useful insect, like the honey-bee.

18) Roth or Updike?
Who are these upstarts? One of them has a pulse, and the other one did until recently. I want not truck with such things.

Which - reading between the lines - means I haven't read enough enough to form an opinion. Which, reading even further between the lines, means I haven't read anything, by either. Oh, the guilty pleasures of public literary humiliation.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Haven't read either, due to them costing money and stuff.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Shakespeare of course. And Milton.

21) Austen or Eliot?
Humph. See below.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Austen and Eliot. Only did Pride and Prejudice last year. Almost read Silas Marner as well, but my courage failed me.

23) What is your favourite novel?
Nostromo. Or The Brothers Karamazov. Or Sentimental Education. Or The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

24) Play?
Julius Ceasar. Or Amadeus, if only to stop me sounding like such a bloody Conrad-Shakespeare-Conrad-Shakespeare bore.

25) Poem?
MacPherson's Rant by James MacPherson.

26) Essay?
Inside The Whale, by George Orwell. Or On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth by William Hazlitt.

27) Short story?
Oh, bloody Hell, you've only gone and given me another chance to mention Conrad again. "Youth,' probably. Or 'Falk,' because it has cannibalism. You can't go wrong with cannibalism.

28) Work of nonfiction?
Probably Trotsky's autobiography. I am serious.

29) Who is your favourite writer?
Are you thick or something? Joe Conrad. Or Bill Shakespeare

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Noam Chomsky. I try to read his stuff, and I think I probably agree with most of it, but I can't abide the way he has to include the phrase 'the racist discourse of American imperialism' in every third sentence he writes.

31) What is your desert island book?
An Act of Terror by Andre Brink. Not because I want to read it, but because I could throw it in the ocean and walk across it to the mainland.

32) And... what are you reading right now?
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.
The Marxists by C. Wright Mills.
Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min
Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes (officially - though I haven't even looked at it in about four months)
The Bible (KJV) - (The poor brute is envying the comparative attention lavished on Don Quixote)