Book quiz

[liv]

snow_leopard posted some interesting questions about reading in bibliotheca. While I'm not sure about cross-posting entries from my journal to a community, I don't see why I shouldn't cross-post relevant stuff from a community to here. So here's my answers:

1) What is your favourite book? Boringly, The Lord of the Rings, I'm afraid. There are a couple of other books that come close, notably AS Byatt's Babel Tower, but LotR has been my favourite just about all my life, so it has a special significance that nothing I've discovered more recently can quite match.

2) What is the book that has most affected/changed you? Ooh, what a good question! Excluding certain parts of the Bible (which affect me because I read the Bible in a completely different way from any other book), I think probably Simone de Beauvoir's Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée. It puts into words certain ideas that have always been part of who I am, but until I read it I didn't know how to articulate them.

3) Your favourite character from a novel? Ebenezer le Page, the eponymous hero of a really obscure book by GB Edwards. He's this sort of semi-recluse, who lives out all his life on Guernsey. He says the most cynical things but has a real genuine spirit behind it all. I had a crush for ages on Toby Coleman from Lynne Reid Banks' The L-Shaped Room, and in fact my first bf bears quite a strong resemblance to him. And Treebeard from LotR has to get a mention.

4) The best villain from a novel? No-one particularly comes to mind. I tend to like villains that are a bit three-dimensional, not just evil incarnate. Hmm. Glenin Ambrai from Melanie Rawn's Exiles series is pretty good.

5) What was the last book you read? The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov

6) What are you reading now? Renegade or Halo² by Timothy Mo

7) What was the last non-fiction book you read? The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

1) What is your favourite book?
Leaving aside the books that appear in the other categories below, I'm torn between two:

Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, is a book I've read many many times over the last eight years or so, and which makes me laugh at passages that I know almost by heart.

Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad, as translated by Michael Kandel. The wordplay is delicious - one can bathe in the texture of the phrases. I wish I knew Polish, so I could read it in the original.

2) What is the book that has most affected/changed you?
Hmm. I'd probably go with Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter. It's a collection of essays on a variety of subjects mathematically- and philosophically- inspired. Many of the ideas and models that I find most useful come from here.

3) Your favourite character from a novel?
I find this a hard question. I think Death, from the Discworld canon, wins, purely by being so strikingly incongruous.

4) The best villain from a novel?
Sophie, the mother of the protagonist, narrator, and all-round-screwed-up-son from Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth. I know, it's not classic villain territory, but she's one of the scariest characters I've read.

5) What was the last book you read?
Greg Egan's Axiomatic, lent me by livredor. Interesting, a series of short sci-fi scenarios, with (on the whole) characters that I could identify well with.

6) What are you reading now?
My next book to read is the new Harry Potter, mainly so my housemates can then discuss the plot without giving stuff away.

7) What was the last non-fiction book you read?
CGI Programming with Perl. Boring but true.

[liv]

Yay for Good Omens. I've not managed to read The Cyberiad yet. Any chance you could lend me a copy when I next see you?

Metamagical Themas is a huge influence on me too, mostly indirectly because of the way you and I have been entangling our ways of thinking for so long now. And also because a certain person paid attention to the fact that I was reading it, which kicked off a chain reaction of events leading to something which is a major part of my life now, five years later.

Glad you liked Axiomatic. Lending books is such a good thing!

And also good news that you're improving your programming, that can't fail to be useful.