Thinking Girl tagged me. I will try to answer these questions, though I’m awful at answering things like these. Must I really pick one book for each? I am hopelessly noncommittal.

1. One book that changed your life?

I’m tempted to say something fun like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or Everybody Poops, but to be honest, three books would answer this category, and those three are the books of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yes, I am a NERD. I gobbled these up in middle school and immersed myself in the world of Tolkien, reading all the offshoots and prequels I could find. I think I really was inspired to write, or at least conceptualize a fictional world, by these books. No, I never learned Elvish, and no, I never wrote any fanfiction. There’s plenty of hot hobbit action out there already

2. One book you have read more than once?

Okay, practically every book I like I read more than once. I am crazy like that. I read like an ADHD person uses TiVo: when I get so absorbed into a story, I want to know what happens to the characters, dammit! So I read really fast, almost skimming, until I find out whether or not the characters are safe / happy / get their comeuppance. Then after finishing the book, either relieved or pissed off, I flip back to the beginning and read it again, more slowly. I know this is terrible practice, but it’s also very helpful when cramming for exams (I didn’t really read read most of my plays in Shakespeare class until after the fact, for instance).

So short answer is: see my reading list.

3. One book you would want on a desert island?

A book on how to get off a desert island!

More seriously: probably The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. I will never get sick of reading that.

4. One book that made you laugh?

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. Read it in high school, and everybody I’ve recommended the book to was surprised by my recommendation. “Really? I thought that book was supposed to be very tragic and sad!” Yes, it is a moving story, but it is set apart from other “gee, war sucks” novels in that it is viciously funny. I can’t think of a single scene in another book that made me laugh harder than the one with Orr and the Italian prostitute very early in the novel, or the interrogation of the poor Anabaptist Henry-Fonda-look-alike. The crazy, surrealist humor made me empathize pretty strongly with the characters by the end of the novel.

5. One book that made you cry?

I have a bitch-heart composed of dry ice, and as such, don’t cry at hardly anything. I’m more likely to cry laughing at inappropriate moments (funerals, accidents, awkward lecturers, grim war novels, what have you).

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. Okay. When I was about twelve and in the full throes of middle-school-angst, I bought all these stupid teen-dying-of-terminal-illness books. You know the type: Lurlene McDaniel’s income is based on young, pretty death. One of the death books that pulled me in was called It Happened to Nancy, an “autobiographical” collection of journal entries by a girl who contracts AIDS through a date rape. The story, in retrospect, smacked of slick, mechanical fakeness, and silly out-of-touch adult ideas of what teenage girls really think about, but man did I ever eat that shit up. I cried, cause it was SO NOT FAIR.

6. One book you wish had been written?

A book for the illiterate!

7. One book you wish had never been written?

Oh, man. Talk about opening a can of worms. Maybe Atlas Shrugged. It continually tops book lists, and it’s basically a flat, boring shill for Rand’s lame philosophy. Though, true to the unabashedly capitalist sentiment of the novel, I guess it’s good for winning scholarships.

8. One book you are currently reading?

Last night I cracked open a coffee table collection of “humorous” stories from the New Yorker. I usually like reading the articles on their website, and I wanted a better idea of how to write comedic stories, so I bought it. Turns out that maybe one out of every twenty are mildly amusing, and the rest are either 1) only funny if you’re a New Yorker or 2) clunky, insufferably erudite. Ha ha, this is from an obscure Shakespeare play re-set in modern-day Manhattan! So funny it doesn’t need a joke!

Some of them are actually funny - mostly stories by Woody Allen (same neurotic Jewish old man as ever), Garrisson Keillor and James Thurber. Otherwise, I’ll probably just stick to reading the website occasionally from now on.

9. One (multiple) book(s) you have been meaning to read?

Crescent, by Diana Abu-Jaber. The boy loved it and lent it to me, and now it’s sitting beside me at work as I type this list (I’ll get to it eventually!). As I Lay Dying, by Faulkner (seems like everyone’s read this but me. I suck at having been an English major). Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, which has been recommended to me about eight times. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, by Yiyun Li.

10. Now tag five people.

Here’s where I suck at memes! I don’t like tagging people because I don’t want to dictate what their next posts are going to be. It’s awfully bossy for my hippie sensibilities (no, thinking girl, I’m not upset at being tagged myself!). So I’ll just go ahead and tag Megan, Hannah, Gienna, seadragon, and Imbrium, and it’s totally up to you to participate

Just finished Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. I’d been meaning to read it ever since I saw him speak last semester, but haven’t gotten around to it till now. It’s a fast read and only took me two days, but it’s fantastic. Not too long ago, my roomie brought up a question his professor asked in class: “what book have you read that you would write?” The prof. said Light in August by Faulkner, a novel amazing and rich in its complexity, but not one that I could really see myself writing (Faulkner’s style, though I love it, is daunting at times. Also I’m none too sure about Faulkner’s awareness of biology and hormones, what with Lena walking all the way across Alabama, barefoot and pregnant, with nary a frown. A minor quibble to an otherwise great novel).

I didn’t have my own answer until reading Haroun - it’s got precisely the right mix of whimsy, smartness, and social allegory. Rushdie said the best children’s novels are written for specific children, a la Lewis Carroll for Alice Liddell, and Rushdie wrote Haroun for his own son. The writer, in the attempt to appeal to a specific child and capture his/her attention, ends up creating something genuinely engaging and unique (Disney movies, which have lately operated on the ‘lowest common denominator’ idea, should take a cue from this). Hopefully that doesn’t mean I have to pop out a baby before I can write my ideal novel. Maybe I can borrow one. Any takers?

Now I’m currently reading another novel that centers on a relationship between a man and a child: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov! Hehe, well, it’s a little different in tone from the other book. I just started it tonight and was a bit offput by the seemingly flowery language at first, but now it’s hard to put down. The pathos of the character is really compelling; also, Nabokov works some clever word plays in the story that I find entertaining (e.g. what he calls the taxi-driver, for those of you who’ve read it).

I guess I’m supposed to be writing a story every day over break, but I honestly think I should be reading more. A lot of my creative writing peers seem to be more well-read (the ones who are actually competitive, that is, not the dorks who haven’t figured out how to properly use quotation marks in dialogue yet). My literary knowledge is just like my knowledge of music, and anything else: bizarrely spotty and mostly self-taught through sources like the Internet and friends. I know of some obscure works/bands but am unfamiliar with obvious canonical ones. For instance, I named my philodendron after Robert Plant (hurr!), but for some reason didn’t associate Jimmy Page with Led Zeppelin (I thought he was just a solo artist until some music nerd gave me a good lashing). Even more sadly, I didn’t know who Ezra Pound was until like a year ago (how embarrassing is that for an English major? ).

So for now I’m just going to read as many “should read” things as I can, and do writing exercises for the rest of break. That way, when I do eventually get off my bum and write, it should be totally gold and Nobel Prize worthy. Then I can publish my honors thesis and make millions of dollars to buy more books (and yarn!).

* edit - I sure abuse the parentheses while blogging. I don’t do this in my fiction, honest!