1. Who is/are your favourite author(s)?*
Jorge Luis Borges, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, George Orwell, James Joyce, W.G. Sebald, Virginia Woolf
2. And your least favourite?
Bradbury's brand of luddism doesn't sit well with me and I think he's pretty average as an author.
3. What is your preferred genre to read?
Magical realism is my favourite but I'll read anything.
4. What is/are the best book(s) you ever read?*
Ficciones, Invisible Man, Invisible Cities, House of Leaves, Leaves of Grass, Picture This.
5. And the worst?*
I had to read the Power of One twice in high school. **** that book.
6. Who do you believe gets more credit than they should as an author?
I'd say Dickens but I think he's also underrated in some ways. Probably Bradbury.
Same again please, when you're ready there mate!
7. What determines, generally, if you stop reading/lose interest in a book?
When I can't stop thinking it's a slog, usually as a product of uninteresting writing style. Public Opinion by Lippmann and Wuthering Heights are the only two that have pushed me to that point.
8. Do you have a Kindle/reader and if not, do you ever intend to get one?
I generally prefer books, but I'd like to get one for travelling.
9. How large (approximately) is your book collection (to the nearest hundred, say)
About 300 books.
10. What is the best line you ever read in a book?
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion
The future always looks good in the golden land, because nobody remembers the past.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Cantos II, Pound
The back-swell now smooth in the rudder-chains,
Black snout of a porpoise
where Lycabs had been,
Fish-scales on the oarsmen.
And I worship.
|
I really love the meter of that line for reasons I can't describe.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon
She left, wondering if she should've called him something, or tried to hit him with any of a dozen surplus, heavy, blunt objects in easy reach. There had been no witnesses. Why hadn't she?
You're chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Shooting an Elephant, Orwell
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Rhinoceros, Ionesco
People who try to hang on to their individuality always come to a bad end. Oh well, too bad! I'll take on the whole of them! I'll put up a fight against the lot of them, the whole lot of them! I'm the last man left, and I'm staying that way until the end. I'm not capitulating!
|
I'll stop there. Hard/good question.
11. What is/are your favourite non-fiction book(s)? *
33 1/3 Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Liberalism: A Counter History, any Baldwin essay collection, Orientalism.
12. What book(s) have you never read, but would like to?*
Tons. Jerusalem by Alan Moore and Middlemarch are a couple that come to mind that I've held off on because of the length. I've read a lot of people talking about Gramsci's ideas on hegemony, so I want to read his full Prison Notebooks for myself once I finish Capital. Plus the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.