{"id":1595,"date":"2008-11-17T21:35:07","date_gmt":"2008-11-17T21:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1595"},"modified":"2008-11-17T21:35:07","modified_gmt":"2008-11-17T21:35:07","slug":"new_book_meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2008\/11\/17\/new_book_meme\/","title":{"rendered":"New Book Meme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I spotted this short meme over at <a href=\"http:\/\/byzantiumshores.blogspot.com\/2008\/11\/books-quiz.html\">Byzantium&#8217;s Shores<\/a> a few days ago&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>What was the last book you bought?<\/b><br \/>\nKerouac&#8217;s <i>On the Road<\/i>. I bought it at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citylights.com\/\">City Lights<\/a> in San Francisco, just like every other semi-literary tourist who happens to wander through North Beach. Forgive me my lameness&#8230;<br \/>\n(For what it&#8217;s worth, the proprietors of City Lights seem quite happy to capitalize on the store&#8217;s appeal to tourists, i.e., its fame as ground zero of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beat_Generation\">Beat movement<\/a>. Copies of Kerouac&#8217;s and Ginsberg&#8217;s major works are plentiful, and the clerk who took my money assured me lots of people buy <i>On the Road<\/i> there and I wasn&#8217;t uncool at all. Well&#8230; he would say that, wouldn&#8217;t he? Have to keep the tourists happy after all&#8230;)<\/li>\n<li><b>Name a book you have read MORE than once.<\/b><br \/>\nThere are lots of those. Off the top of my head, the novelization of <i>Star Wars<\/i>, ostensibly by George Lucas but really ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster. The Han Solo books by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brian-daley.com\/\">Brian Daley<\/a>. Most of Robert Heinlein&#8217;s &#8220;juveniles.&#8221; <i>The Anubis Gates<\/i> by Tim Powers.<\/li>\n<li><b>Has a book ever fundamentally changed the way you see life? If yes, what was it? <\/b><br \/>\nYes, an academic book I ran across in college called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Overworked-American-Unexpected-Decline-Leisure\/dp\/046505434X\"><i>The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure<\/i><\/a> by Juliet Schor. The book&#8217;s thesis is, essentially, that Americans work too damn much to acquire possessions we don&#8217;t need and don&#8217;t have time to enjoy anyway because we&#8217;re always working, and that our society didn&#8217;t have to turn out this way (the change came, Schor says, after World War II) and doesn&#8217;t have to remain this way. I&#8217;d never known before reading this that Europeans generally work far fewer hours than Americans, never considered that one&#8217;s quality of life could be measured in something other than money, i.e., in available <i>time<\/i>. That&#8217;s a realization I still feel very keenly; I&#8217;m very concerned with what the corporate overlords like to call &#8220;work-life balance,&#8221; and while I don&#8217;t think of myself as particularly lazy, I <i>do<\/i> think that balance is far too heavily weighted on the work side of the scale for most people. Especially me.<\/li>\n<li><b>How do you choose a book? (E.g. by cover design and summary, recommendations or reviews?) <\/b><br \/>\nAll of the above. If a friend tells me they really liked something or think I would really like it, I seek it out. If I happen to read a glowing review of something that sounds intriguing, I&#8217;ll seek it out. If I&#8217;m browsing and something has a particularly cool cover, I&#8217;ll pick it up. You get the idea&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><b>Do you prefer Fiction or Non-Fiction? <\/b><br \/>\nDepends on my mood. I read plenty of both. While few things are as satisfying as a good novel, I find a lot of pleasure in a well-written history or science book, or a biography, too. The best examples of those categories read much like novels anyhow.<\/li>\n<li><b>What\u2019s more important in a novel, beautiful writing or a gripping plot? <\/b><br \/>\nMy sarcastic first thought is, &#8220;Can&#8217;t I have both?&#8221; Seriously, can&#8217;t I? But if you really pushed me, I&#8217;d probably have to concede that I prefer a really well-plotted yarn to exquisite words. I like to be told a <i>story<\/i>, and if the story is compelling enough, I can overlook even the clunkiest writing. (For example, Clive Cussler is an abysmal writer in terms of style, but he tells a cracking good adventure tale.) Conversely, I have struggled with books that feature some heartbreakingly precise and elegant craftsmanship but are boring as hell. That describes much of the &#8220;literary fiction&#8221; genre, in my opinion.<br \/>\nCan&#8217;t these two extremes meet in the middle somewhere?<\/li>\n<li><b>Most loved\/memorable character (character\/book) <\/b><br \/>\nHm. I&#8217;m somewhat ashamed to admit this, since I fancy myself a fairly literary guy, but my most beloved characters tend to come from movies or television, not books. However, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Roland_Deschain\">Roland<\/a>, the last gunslinger of Gilead in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Dark_Tower_(series)\">Stephen King&#8217;s epic <i>Dark Tower<\/i><\/a> series, lives and breathes in my mind in a way that few literary characters ever have&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><b>Which book or books can be found on your nightstand at the moment? <\/b><br \/>\n<i>Significant Others<\/i> by Armistead Maupin, volume 5 in his <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tales_of_the_city\"><i>Tales of the City<\/i> series<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><b>What was the last book you\u2019ve read, and when was it? <\/b><br \/>\nArmistead Maupin&#8217;s <i>Babycakes<\/i>, volume 4 of the series I mentioned above, which I finished last week sometime.<\/li>\n<li><b>Have you ever given up on a book half way in? <\/b><br \/>\nNot very often &#8212; I&#8217;m one of those who grapple valiantly to the end, even as I&#8217;m thinking that life&#8217;s too short for this sort of torture and I should just hurl the damn thing across the room and be done with it. For example, I read an astoundingly dull biography of Ian Fleming a few years ago that I really should&#8217;ve put down, but somehow I just couldn&#8217;t bring myself to do it. It took me months to get through it, but I finally did. And in the end, my reward was&#8230; well, I&#8217;m still working on that one. I honestly don&#8217;t know what the big deal about finishing that book was.<br \/>\nHowever, I simply could <i>not<\/i> penetrate Thomas Pynchon&#8217;s <i>The Crying of Lot 49<\/i>. I think I made it to page 75 or so and still hadn&#8217;t discerned anything resembling a plot, so I just had to surrender. I felt very bad about that one, because I don&#8217;t like to think I wasn&#8217;t up to the challenge, and because my friend Cranky Robert had spoken so very highly of it &#8212; in fact, now that I think about it, he bought me the copy I was trying to read &#8212; but I just couldn&#8217;t see the point of the thing. It stands out as one of the few genuinely painful reading experiences of my life.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And now, I think I&#8217;m going to go read a few chapters before bed&#8230; I suggest you all do the same&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I spotted this short meme over at Byzantium&#8217;s Shores a few days ago&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memes-and-quizzes","category-the-bookshelf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}