Finally, a book meme that asks a little more than “list your 10 favourite books” or “here’s a big list of books, which ones have you read?”.

One of the things I do frequently is to browse the blogrolls of the bloggers on my blogroll. In this case, I wandered over to Stephen Lang’s site, which is very much a book blog, and had a wander through his blogroll. On the site ‘Incurable Logophilia’, I found a post entitled rainy friday, time for a book meme, which actually asks some book related questions that I need to think about.

So I thought I’d give it a go…

A book you have read more than once

Like Verbivore (the person behind Incurable Logophilia), I have read many — indeed probably most — of my books more than once. Unlike Verbivore, it doesn’t tend to be to look at structure, narrative voice and so on: I read simply for enjoyment, so it will be books that I like. So as there are loads of books I’ve read more than once, I’ll just pick one by glancing along my bookshelves and seeing which one catches my eye: H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror

If you’ve not read anything by H.P. Lovecraft, you really oughta. He might not be that well known, but he has influenced pretty much everyone and everything in the horror genre since the 1930s.

A book you are currently reading

Well, there are three books that I’m part-way through, and intend coming back to finish, so any of these would really count. There’s ‘The Righteous Men’, ‘Exit Music’ and the one I’ve plumped for: The Secret History of The World. Why? It’s just that bit different. It may well be a complete load of tosh, but it presents a different world view, and it’s always fun to look from another perspective now and again.

A book you would want on a desert island

Well, apart from the obvious jokes like “how to build a raft from palm leaves” or “desert island survival”, I can’t think of a particular book. I’m not a Shakespeare or a Dickens buff, so won’t be going for ‘the classics’: instead I’ll have to pick something that I can read again and again.

Hmm… but what? I’m guessing if I’m going to be reading it over and over, it would be nice if I could dip in and out of it, so I’m probably going to go for short stories or essays. I think I’ll plump for “the complete Black Widowers mysteries”, on the basis that if such a thing does not already exist in book form, then I’m not prepared to be dumped on a desert island unless someone does publish such a thing.

A book that made you laugh

This one is easy. It’s a book an English teacher lent me when I was 11 or 12, and I was — as is not uncommon for me — reading as I was walking along the street going about my business. Except that I was laughing out loud before I got to the bottom of the first page, reading about how the narrator has idly been looking at a medical book, and appears to have more than a dash of hypochondria…

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever — read the symptoms – discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it — wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance — found, as I expected, that I had that too, — began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically — read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee?

Jerome K. Jerome: Three Men In A Boat

A book that made you angry

Angry? I can’t really think of books that made me angry. I mean, there’s times I’ll think “I don’t like this book” or “I don’t like this character” or “I disagree with what the author is saying”, but angry seems a little over the top. After all, it’s not exactly difficult to stop reading when you’ve had enough…

If you mean angry at the way people are treated, then it would have to be something historical or factual, because I don’t tend to get angry at characters. One of the things that stuck with me though was the brutal and inhumane torture/punishments inflicted by the Dutch in Giles Milton’s book Nathaniel’s Nutmeg.

A book that made you cry

A book that made me cry? Erm… I’ll have to duck out of this one, I’m afraid. I can’t think of one. I’m obviously not emotional enough when it comes to reading books…

A really intense book

They don’t get much more intense than this. We Need To Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver tells the story of a child gone wrong, written as a series of letters from the mother to his father, wondering what precisely made him go bad. How it is to feel when your son is imprisoned for the murder of his classmates, how you shrink away from people in the supermarket and so on, how you wonder about whether it was actions of yours that pushed him down that path, or whether he would have turned out bad anyway. Did you miss signs?

It’s a book with sometimes deeply unpleasant subject matter; I don’t particularly like or sympathise with any of the characters, but it is well constructed, and it is certainly quite intense at times.

A book you wish had never been written

Again, we’re back with this “why would I want a book not to have been written” business. I’m not one of those people who believes in suppressing knowledge or ideas.

It’s never nice when a writer kills off a favourite character, but that’s the author’s priviledge, and I don’t begrudge them it. There’s also certain books which have inspired others to do bad things, but like I say, I don’t believe in suppressing ideas. There’s also certain books which have gone on to form major franchises which get on my nerves to some extent — the whole Da Vinci code ‘genre’ that seems to have sprung up overnight, for example — but while the bandwagon-ness of it annoys me, some of the books are actually quite good.

However, I can think of one. There is an exception to my rule of “well, you can always stop reading if you don’t like it”, and that’s when you have to read a book in school. I am therefore going to pick one of the books that is considered one of the great classics of English literature simply because as a fourteen year old, I couldn’t give a fried monkey’s fart about miserly weavers and abandoned children. So yes, I would consign Silas Marner to history’s dustbin.

A book you would recommend to almost anyone

Ah, this is a toughie. I love the Discworld novels, but not everyone likes fantasy fiction. I loved The Naked Jape by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves, which looks at jokes and humour in detail; there’s Left Foot Forward, the story of a journeyman footballer (what it’s actually like to be a pro-footballer outside the mega-rich league), and Heart Shaped Box, one of the best — believable, and genuinely chilling — modern ghost stories I’ve read in a long time.

But in each case, you’d probably need to like that particular sort of book. So instead I’m going to go for something that’s educational, that’s interesting, that’s easy to read, and that everyone I know who has ever read the book has liked it.

Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything..

A book that changed your life

It’s difficult to think of a book that’s changed my life as an adult, where my opinions have been shaped by a number of different books, by discussions with other people, by my own personal experiences, what I’ve seen on the news and so on.

But as a kid, it’s a bit different. There was the book which was read to me at school which virtually overnight changed me from someone who didn’t really see the point in reading, to being someone desperate to learn to read as hard as I could so that I could read more of the book than just the chapter we’d get at school, because I was so desperate to know what happened next.

This was of course The Magic Faraway Tree, by the much maligned (albeit sometimes correctly) Enid Blyton. And of course my edition had people with names like “Dick” and “Fanny” as opposed to the slightly less anatomical ones found in the more modern editions…

As well as that, there was the adventure story The Quest for the Sword of Infinity, the first book in the Lightbringer Trilogy by Samantha Lee (and now sadly, seemingly long out of print) which was the first book I read (probably aged 7 or 8…) that made me want to write, a passion which has remained with me ever since.

[Note: if anyone hears anything about any of these books coming back into print (The Lightbringer Trilogy: The Quest for the Sword of Infinity, The Land Where Serpents Rule, The Path Through The Circle of Time), please drop me a line; they were library books when I read them as a kid and I'd love to get my own copies -- nor have I been able to track down much information about the author either!]