In which I am tagged...
(Courtesy of Morgue: http://www.additiverich.com/morgue/archi
ves/002129.html)
1. You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?
Erm,
Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull, I guess.
It's a very good book with lots of interesting characters, and everytime you think you have a handle on what the book is about it suddenly changes direction on you. And Friedriech Engels is a secondary character, and Karl Marx puts one of the primary characters up for the night, which has got to be a recommendation right there.
2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Not nearly so interesting a crush as I've had on real living people. :-)
I suspect that the fictional characters that I find interesting I probably wouldn't get on with well in real life. All the spiky sparkly things about them that make them exciting to a passive reader would likely make them very annoying to try and get on with.
3. The last book you bought is: The uppermost book in my DCM book sale bag is
The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book by, well, Arthur Rackham. But I also got
The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, an omnibus of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, a book called
The Unfair Sex (written in the 50s as dating advice to young women and was all about how reprehensible men are, although really it should be
The Unfair Sexes because the advice the author gave on how to behave was pretty damn reprehensible to me.) And some fairy stories which
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repton_infinitykept trying to steal. All hail the Downtown Community Mission!
4. The last book you finished is: Howard's End by E. M. Forster, a love story told in food and furniture and real estate. Part of a university course I'm reading right now on novels. I enjoyed it a lot, although I found the pacing a wee bit odd. It's like Forster got four fifths through and suddenly realised his deadline was two weeks away, so he squished half a novel worth of plot into the last fifth.
5. What are you currently reading? Passage to India, also by E. M. Forster.
(See comments on university course above. This would have been a somewhat more varied meme a couple of weeks ago when I was on study break and reading whatever I felt like at the time.
type: The secret history of letters by Simon Loxley. It's a slightly racy history of the development of type faces (although it isn't very detailed about the varieties that turned up in the 15th century*), and is actually quite interesting.
6. Five books you would take to a desert island. I am at a loss to answer the question. It would probably depend on what day I was going to be kidnapped. Um. OK, a try.
Freedom and Necessity. Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers.
Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks.
A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer.
Um. Inspiration fails me.
The Uplift War by David Brin, I guess, that happened to catch my eye in the bookshelf.
7.Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why? elven_alchemistbecause I think she's read a lot of different books to me.
allovabecause she's a literature geek like me, and we're always fantastically interesting. And modest, too. :-)
clarityburntime because she usually has something insightful to say.
You have permission to not answer until February 2010. (Steph adds: Or at all. :->)
* Says the girl who recently had to identify a typeface from c1475. It turned out to be from the 'Fere-humanistica' family which was popular for about 25 years in the second half of the 15th century and was developed from the bookhand used for scholastic and theological texts. But not bibles. Back then they used a bookhand that was the inspiration for what's now called 'blackletter' or 'textura' to do religious texts and legal documents. All this came from another book which was of the more boring reference quality, rather than the one that I took home and started reading all the way through. Very likely this is far more information than anyone really wants to know.
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