Monday, November 24, 2008

(Book) tag, I'm it!

Okay, Miss Kitty over at Educated and Poor has tagged me for the Seven Weird Book Facts meme.  This is a good thing--I've been worn out lately, as I've been roped into being on the office party committee at DA, and I cannot brain this evening.  So, this meme gives me just what I need to make a post without hurting my noggin.  First, some rules:
--Share seven random or weird Book Facts about yourself.
--Then tag seven other people.
--Notify the seven others that they have been tagged.

I don't think I have seven other people I can tag, but I do know a few.  So here goes:
  1. I cannot read just one book at a time.  I have to read at least two or three at once, plus a couple of magazines.  I read each book or magazine depending on where I'm sitting in the house.  Like right now, I'm reading Brain Rules if I sit on the infamous red chaise, the latest issue of "Bust" magazine if I'm at the dining room table, one of several catalogs if I'm on the futon in the TV rooms with Guy, and the latest Yoga Journal in bed.  I have some other books and 'zines I'll be taking along when we drive to St. Louis on Wednesday for Thanksgiving.
  2. I've finished every book I've ever read, no matter how awful, insipid, or wretched I found it, with three exceptions: Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe, and The Bell Curve.  Melville's 19th-century prose knocked me unconscious with its florid verbosity (granted, I was in 6th grade), Defoe's glacial pace made me wonder when the hell they were even gonna get out of the dock and on the water, and Herrnstein and Murray's tome was heavy on the scientific data, as it should have been.  The Bell Curve caused such a stir when it was published, and because I lived in a particularly racist part of the country, I thought I should know what it said.  Alas, I wasn't ready to read it when I bought it and only made it a few chapters in.
  3. I very, very rarely read fiction.  It's been my experience that truth is stranger than fiction, and it tends to make a better story.
  4. The rare exception to #3 was when I took a modern western lit class at Georgia Tech, which the professor (Terry Harpold, gawd love him) subtitled "Grotesqueries".  We read some fantastic novels and stories--many of them banned in their countries of origin--with some wonderful storylines and characters: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and of course, Kafka's Metamorphosis.  "One morning, as Gregor Samsa wa swaking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug...."
  5. The worst book I ever read--worse than Dostoyevsky or Flaubert, nay far worse--was Loving What Is by Byron Katie.  It is the biggest bunch of psuedospiritual tripe and the most psychologically irresponsible waste of paper and paste I have ever laid my eyes on.  I can't even describe the book for raising my voice and using sailor-like profanity; it makes me so furious that someone cut that lunatic a check for that crap she called "self help."  [spitting on ground]  I try really hard to be respectful for all authors and for free expression of ideas, but it is the only book that I have ever truly thrown across a room.
  6. Favoritest book ever?  Watership Down by Richard Adams.  A book about pretty smart wild bunnies in England?  Sign me up.  And even though I know the ending, it still makes me weep with quiet, humane joy.
  7. I'm a voracious and compulsive reader.  Where some people feel like they need to text or talk on their cell phones all the time, I have to read all the time.  I'll study the backs of cereal boxes, I'll pore over pamphlets on melanomas, I even read the entire "TV Week" insert in the Sunday paper, just to see what all movies are playing this week and on what channels.  They tried to make me go to bookhab, but I said no, no, no.
Okay, that's all I got.  I tap everyone Kitty called out as well as Eric over at The Reason of Voice and Miz Scarlett at her new blog.

5 comments:

Charissa said...

I'm constantly reading too! I've been so desperate as to study and compare the ingredients of assorted cold meds when I was short of reading material in the loo.

Lilylou said...

Thanks, Pixie, it's fun to know these new things about you! Happy Reading!

Miss Kitty said...

Shweet! I lufs ur buk fackts lulz. An I lufs teh Watership Down, 2.

Anonymous said...

um such a small small world! i had a class with terry harpold during my undergraduate studies at UF!!! that class focused on Lacan's and Poe's works. so good. six years later i find myself using the information from that class.

tnt

Anonymous said...

Speaking of Poe- Now THAT MAN will make you check the window and door locks IN THE DAY TIME!!!!! The man is WAAAYYYY more frightening than Stephen King or Ann Rice. EEooow!