Livre d'Or

*blush* -- I will try to live up to your compliments!

You definitely should read Tristram Shandy (and I for my part would like to read Jacques le fataliste now you've described it) -- it's very funny.

I was supposed to exclude books that changed my thinking about books.

As a kind of thought-experiment I started trying to answer the question of whether there are many thoughts-about-books which don't (at least potentially) have some bearing on thoughts-about-things-that-are-not-books -- e.g. the issue of intertextuality could raise various metaphysical questions about whether or to what extent a thing's thingness is dependent on its context; many thoughts about literary writing styles have implications and applications for other forms of communication ... and so on.

(I do, in general, find it quite hard to say where one thing stops and another thing starts, with all except the most concrete of things, and even then I'm never certain.)

Then there's the problem of how specific a "thought" can be: that is, there seems to be an unspoken agreement in our discussions of this that a "thought" must be in some sense general (or generalisable). So while I suppose thoughts-about-books which were not applicable to things-other-than-books could include very specific things like "I enjoyed reading Some Book by Anne Author", those wouldn't be very interesting changes-of-thought. On the other hand, "I am enjoying reading X" could be the start of thinking along the lines of "The books I enjoy most seem to be books where X happens", which might prove to show something more general and more interesting about one's aesthetic judgements, or the type of characters (and hence people?) one likes (or wants to be) ... and so on.

That's not to say that the general is always more interesting, but it's more, uh, generally applicable.

I think I may have just beaten my own personal record for "smallest point made in largest number of words", there. :-}