Tuesday
Literary Hub has a “Book Marks Questionnaire” that is invites contemporary authors to answer. I’m not a literary author but thought it would be fun to answer the (slightly adjusted) questions. So here goes.
Oh, and I’d love to hear from readers. Feel free to take the full questionnaire or just answer a couple of the questions. If you have trouble posting, e-mail me your answers and I’ll post them for you. My e-mail is rrbates (at) smcm (dot) edu.
Book Marks: First book you remember loving?
It’s a toss-up between Babar, Little Black Sambo, and Little Bobo and His Blue Jacket. (For what it’s worth, the first two have been attacked as colonialist fantasies.)
BM: Favorite re-read?
Jane Austen’s Persuasion. (It used to be Pride and Prejudice.)
BM: What book [are you] most in conversation with?
Brothers Karamazov. I want Father Zosima’s 50-page sermon (or however long it is) to go on even longer. Alyosha is an amazing character
BM: A book that blew your mind?
War and Peace. I was like Keats reading Chapman’s Homer since, like him, I didn’t come to the masterpiece until late in life. (“Oft of that wide expanse had I been told/ That deep brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne/ But never did I breathe its pure serene/Til I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.”) The world seemed so much bigger after I read it.
BM: Last book you read?
Bulgakov’s Stalin-era allegory Heart of a Dog (and before that a book I liked even better, Turgenev’s Smoke)
BM: A book that made you cry?
Kate Douglas Wiggins’s The Birds’ Christmas Carol (when my father read it to us as children.) Runner-up: Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (which he also read to us). We all sobbed in unison at both endings.
BM: What book from the past year would you like to give a shout-out to?
Margaret Atwood, The Testaments (oddly hopeful for Atwood)
BM: A book that actually made you laugh out loud?
John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meanie (I was reading the Christmas pageant scene in an airplane and had to suffocate my laughter)
BM: What’s one book you wish you had read during your teenage years?
As a shy, sensitive, and introverted boy, I could have used Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower but it wasn’t written yet. Catcher in the Rye didn’t work because I found it too painful.
BM: Favorite book to [recommend]?
Always Shakespeare. But different plays depending on whom I’m talking to.
BM: Classic book you hate?
Joyce’s Ulysses. (And I don’t find Portrait of an Artist much more likable. It takes Dubliners to salvage Joyce for me)
BM: Classic book on your To Be Read pile?
Henry Fielding’s Amelia
BM: What’s a book with a really great sex scene?
Tom Jones dining with Mrs. Waters. (The movie version is good but the novel version is even better.) Darker answer: The Story of O, which titillates me in ways that I’m ashamed to admit. (By the way, I identify with O)
BM: Favorite book no one has heard of?
I suspect many people have heard of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White only because of the television series but what an amazing work. The Moonstone and A Rogue’s Life are also wonderful reads.
BM: Favorite book of the 21st century?
Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (with 1Q84 close behind)
BM: Favorite book you were assigned in high school?
Jane Eyre. (I wasn’t assigned it but remember reading it on a hot day in the school library. Of books assigned, Shaw’s Pygmalion.)
BM: Book(s) you’re reading right now?
Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter, Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf (sent to me by reader Donna Raskin), and Anne Perry’s Acceptable Loss
BM: Favorite children’s book?
Hands down, Lord of the Rings (At 11, I even wrote Tolkien a fan letter and received a reply, which I still have.)
BM: Book you wish would be adapted for a film/tv show?
If there is not a series based on Anne Perry’s William Monk or her Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels, there should be.