One Book to, in the darkness, bind them

According to my informal research, well over 1000 people have completed the One Book meme, which started at the Faith and Theology blog. While I imagine it would be fascinating to see how responses have transformed in nature and tone since then, I'll settle for caving to absomassive peer pressure and providing some likely-to-change-depending-on-the-hour-of-the-day answers of my own.

1. One book that changed your life:

When I think of a life being changed, I think of the very nature of the game one plays becoming at once different, like starting a game of checkers and ending it in a checkmate, or that moment in the original Half-Life when Gordon gets captured and suddenly you've got to fight your way back out of imprisonment after losing all your weapons. For the purest example of this I think you'd have to go back to my childhood, way back, and find that first book I ever read by myself. (I think it was about Raggedy Anne & Andy.) I mean, games don't much change more for the player than when they learn the language moves are made in. But for my One Book I'm going to give the nod to Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. It fundamentally changed my view of what literature is and what it can do and, if I'm feeling melodramatic about it, it may be responsible for much of what's followed in life.

2. One book that you've read more than once:

Funny because I was just talking about this the other night. I've read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson twice. I've read it twice because I really liked it the first time but then I realized a while after I read it that I couldn't remember anything that happened in the book. Then when I read it the second time I realized I could remember all of it, but only when I was reading it would it come back to me. Now I'm thinking I'll probably read it a third time because it's all gotten blurry again.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island:

I'm going to wait until it's released in Fall 2007--can I do that, can I place a temporal restriction on my arrival at my own hypothetical little island?--and take the edition of War and Peace that Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are translating. I've never read it, and I have a hunch I'll need to be on a deserted island if I'm ever going to. Them crazy nineteenth century Russian writers and their love of words.

4. One book that made you laugh:

I'm thinking of actual laugh-out-loud action here and it's hard to come by; it's a rare book that cuts through my hard-held belief that laughing to oneself while alone in one's living room at night is a sure sign of madness. So call me paranoid but I'm going to go with a safe answer and say The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams because seriously, come on, the whale's monologue was the sort of thing you'd be insane not to have laughed at when you first read it.

5. One book that made you cry:

If you want to talk about emotionally devastating literature...I think I remember Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison hurting like all hell. It's been about ten years since I read it and much of it's gone out of my head by now, and I'm thinking it's time to add this one to the list of books that would qualify as answers to question number two, above. So I don't much know what to say about it other than to point at it and say, "Yeah. That. Hurt."

6. One book that you wish had been written:

David Foster Wallace's next fucking novel, already. Come on, man!

7. One book that you wish had never been written:

Oh gosh. There's not many books I actively despise. So I'll use this space to make an embarrassing admission: when I was a far younger reader, the first time I read Neuromancer by William Gibson, I hated it with literal throwing-it-across-the-room passion. I don't remember why. I remember thinking it was stupid, and I couldn't see what the big deal about it was. It is perhaps the strangest and most "wrong" of a reaction I've ever had to a novel. A few years later I tried it again and liked it much more. There's a lesson in this, I'm sure. (Also interesting is that the only other Gibson book I've read is Pattern Recognition, which I really enjoyed, first time out.)

8. One book you're currently reading:

The one (and only--I'm not the kind of guy who has fourteen books going at once, if you discount the Beckett I have on the back of the toilet; and I don't count it because so far I've only read the opening paragraph of Molloy there, though I've read that paragraph about ten times now) book I'm reading right now is The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's a very long book. I suspect it will be the only book I'm reading for a while, which is fine. I snapped my way through a succession of very short books in a very short period of time before I started this one, when I decided I needed to throw a boulder into my path to force myself to slow down for a while. Plus I made a vague commitment several months ago to clear out some of the largest and most imposing books on the TBR pile before the end of this year. I guess it was finally time to honor that promise. Plus I've seen the movies so many bloody damned times by now that I was starting to feel immense guilt about not having tackled the book yet. So.

9. One book you've been meaning to read:

This is me making vague hand-motions towards the obligatory litblogger TBR stacks and shelves. (Seriously, it's nuts right now. It's been nuts for a while now but really it's just nuts looking. And I don't even get free books from publishers. I keep like finding other books on the "already read" shelves that I guess I never actually read or which warrant re-reading and I keep moving them over to the TBR section. Do I really need to re-read Infinite Jest any time soon? Well, yeah, I do, but. Uh. Nevermind.) If I had to pick out one, though...lately I've had a strange urge to give Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle another shot, so I'm going to say Quicksilver. I was very excited about the books when they started to come out, and then I got through 400 pages of Quicksilver, and I got sort of angry at it and quit, because it was slow and not nearly as interesting, I thought, as Cryptonomicon. But now I'm thinking of maybe taking another stab at it sometime in the next ten months. Maybe I'll have better luck with it this time through.

10. Now tag five people:

There's nobody left to tag. Everybody on the internet has done this meme. Everybody.

Okay, that's not true. I tag everybody who reads my li'l blog via the LJ feed, whether or not I know you. I also tag everybody else on the internet who hasn't done this meme yet. Let's just finish it up this weekend, 'kay? Kay.