Tag Archives: Booking Through Thursday

The Best Book I Never Read

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We’ve all seen the lists, we’ve all thought,”I should really read that someday,” but for all of us, there are still books on The List that we haven’t actually gotten around to reading. Even though we know they’re fabulous. Even though we know that we’ll like them. Or that we’ll learn from them. Or just that they’re supposed to be worthy. We just haven’t gotten around to them yet.

What’s the best book that YOU haven’t read yet?

I’ve got some doozies, for as well-read as I am:

Crime and Punishment
100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera
Wuthering Heights
Rabbit, Run

Stories (Booking Through Thursday)

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If you’re anything like me, one of your favorite reasons to read is for the story. Not for the character development and interaction. Not because of the descriptive, emotive powers of the writer. Not because of deep, literary meaning hidden beneath layers of metaphor. (Even though those are all good things.) No … it’s because you want to know what happens next?

Oh yeah, this is totally me. Story trumps all. I wouldn’t give two figs for diamond sharp prose and stellar ideas without a story. That’s why I love fantasy and YA so much.

Books vs. Movies (Booking Through Thursday)

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Yay–my question got picked!! If you’re coming here from Booking Through Thursday, please note that my url is superfastreader.com, with no “wordpress.” I’d be ever so grateful if you update this if you are linking to me. And thanks for the link love!

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Books and films both tell stories, but what we want from a book can be different from what we want from a movie. Is this true for you? If so, what’s the difference between a book and a movie?

So many great answers! For me, when I see a movie I want to be swept away with sounds and images and emotions. I love big epics and musicals for this reason. When I read, I want to get lost inside the skin of another person. Movies tend not to excel in this sort of thing, but it is possible–The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Morvern Callar come to mind.

Add your answer here!

Mayday! (Booking Through Thursday)

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Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember?

This is a no-brainer. If I had to sell my plasma to do it, I would buy books. If I had to sell my passport, I would buy books. There is no way in all the universe that I would get on a plane with nothing to read but Skymall.

I would pick up a new hardcover that I’ve been wanting to read, a Stephen King or Ann Rule paperback I’ve read before, and probably a trade paperback I have not read. Plus a Vanity Fair and some trashy women’s magazine. That should get me through a six hour flight–not that I will read all of that, but I won’t be anxious about running out of things to read.

As Amazon is my witness, I’ll never go bookless again.

Writing Challenge (Booking Through Thursday)

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  • Pick up the nearest book. (I’m sure you must have one nearby.)
  • Turn to page 123.
  • What is the first sentence on the page?
  • The last sentence on the page?
  • connect them together.(And no, you may not transcribe the entire page of the book–that&’s cheating!)

From The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith:

“That is, if there’s some reason to hide it and there usually is if a man’s been murdered.”

“Murdered? Who said anything about that?” Carole paced up and down the length of the small apartment hallway. She could no more tell Jensen the truth than she could gouge out her own eyes. Then again, King Lear had always been her favorite Shakespeare play. “Ah, to play Cordelia again!”

“You never were very good, you know.” Jensen snapped his book shut. “And I’m sick to God of hearing about your thespian aspirations. You and I were never meant for anything other than the ordinary.”

A rage filled Carole, startling her with its ferocity. Jensen never took her seriously, not in ten years of marriage, five of which she spent in audition after audition, only ever “good enough,” never hired, never relieved from the pressure of the dream she’d carried since she was a little girl. And then, the babies started coming, and who cared about Carole’s dreams anymore? Not Jensen, the man whose face she used to see before her eyes when she closed them at night. Her mouth tasted of metal as she allowed herself to feel the full measure of her fury towards the sloppy, careless life he’d given to her. She would tell him the truth, and demand the respect that should have been hers from the moment he first said, “I love you.”

“I’m not joking. She said she came by to play with the babies, but you know her idea of playing is to light up a cigarette and turn on Dr. Phil. She started in on the house. Dirty baseboards. Cereal bowls still in the sink at ten in the morning. And all the while I started to see something I’d never seen before. And that’s how much she looks like you. So I put drain cleaner in her coffee. She keeled over right in front of me and her body is in the trunk of my car. I killed your mother and I’m not sorry. I’d kill you, too, if we didn’t need your paycheck.” Carole waited, breathless, even gleeful. “Do you believe me, darling?”

“Yes, sure,” Jensen said attentively, as if waiting for the rest.

Lit-Ra-Chur (Booking Through Thursday)

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When somebody mentions literature what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?) Do you read literature (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?

Honestly? I think of books I don’t want to read, not because they’re bad, per se, but because they’re written to do something other than tell a captivating story. I put Joyce and Pynchon in this category. They’re about as “high art” as novels go, and while I appreciate what they achieve, you won’t find me reading them for pleasure, the way I do with Tolstoy and DMeickens and Shakespeare.

Real Live Boy Weighs in on Girl Book Debate

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My pastor has four kids, all of whom are great readers. His second son in particular is a real book lover, and though he is 13 I feel like he is a kindred spirit to me, because we like a lot of the same books.

So I posed him the question I raised in the latest Booking Through Thursday post–namely, would he read a book like Anne of Green Gables?

His answer at first was, yes, of course, if it’s a good book, I’ll read it. But as we talked the real answer came out–he’d read it, but only if there was nothing around to read. A true bookworm’s answer! Better to read a book that isn’t necessarily for you than have nothing to read at all.

He agreed with me that girl books can be tough for boys to want to read. Then we got into a discussion about the Dark is Rising movie and how Hollywood always screws stuff like that up.

Hero (Booking Through Thursday)

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You should have seen this one coming … Who is your favorite Male lead character? And why?

I don’t connect with male protagonists the way I do with female, so I can’t really come up with an absolute favorite. And this reminds me of a conversation I’ve been having with my pastor’s wife, who is a huge reader, raising a family of readers. I said that I think that girls will read boy books, but boys won’t read girl books. I was a huge fan of classic boy books like Treasure Island and Captains Courageous when I was younger, but I can’t imagine a boy my age losing himself in Anne of Green Gables or Little House on the Prairie.

What do you think?

Format (Booking Through Thursday)

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All other things (like price and storage space) being equal, given a choice in a perfect world, would you rather have paperbacks in your library? Or hardcovers? And why?

I prefer trade edition paperbacks, for the most part, because I do a lot of my reading on the subway, and hardcovers get really heavy and unwieldy. They’re also better for reading in bed, especially when they have to rest on a pregnant belly!

I also tend to prefer the way that trade paperbacks look, mainly because they seem to age more gracefully than the paper covers on most hardcovers. However, hardcovers survive rereadings better than paperback, and you kind of can’t beat the feeling of scoring a brand new book hot off the presses.

About a year ago, I was walking in Park Slop Brooklyn with a friend of mine, and we passed by a stack of books that someone had left out on the curb. Discarded books always call to me, and lo and behold this particular stack contained pristine hardcover copies of George RR Martin’s A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. I quickly snatched them up and bookmooched away my paperback copies. I have A Feast for Crows in paperback, and I’m still hoping to find A Game of Thrones hardcover on bookmooch or elsewhere. I’d love to have a complete collection.

Now, I ought to add that the hardcover/paperback debate is one I think of constantly, because of my obsession with what James Kunstler calls The Long Emergency. Some people build bomb shelters, I’m building a library against the day when oil becomes too scarce to sustain our current way of life. (Of course, I do have faith in new energy sources and also have hopes that Kunstler is an alarmist.) But here’s my dilemma–hardcovers last longer, so ostensibly they’d be the wiser choice for a library to sustain me into my dotage. However, if the lights really do go off we might be forced into a more primitive way of living, in which case paperbacks will take up less space and be easier to carry in case we turn into nomads.

I’m totally insane, I know. At the very least, I’ll be the one clutching my copy of War and Peace as I wait to have stone soup poured into my tin cup at the peak oil refugee camp. Where I’m going to get a tin cup is another story, but it fits the picture, don’t you think?

After the Honeymoon (Booking Through Thursday)

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Here’s something for Valentine’s Day.

Have you ever fallen out of love with a favorite author? Was the last book you read by the author so bad, you broke up with them and haven’t read their work since? Could they ever lure you back?

In college and for a time afterwards, I was obsessed with Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. I must have read it at least 8 times. I read Eco’s other works, including his semiotics, and would have considered him a favorite author.

A few years ago I decided it was time re-read Foucault’s Pendulum. I delighted in the prospect of rediscovering a work that I remembered to be rich, suspenseful, mind-bending, and fun.

Sad to say, I found a book that was thin, tedious, obtuse, and dull. I think it’s a book that only makes sense to a pseudo-intellectual twit in his/her twenties.

I was disappointed, to say the least. And I also recently discovered that the movie version of Eco’s The Name of the Rose doesn’t hold up so well, either.