Wednesday, March 07, 2007
2:16 PM
Booktalk
After Maita, Kael, Margie, Joel, Waps, and Larry:
Every year, a version of this survey comes my way -- and my answers seem to keep changing. This time though I'll follow the rules and stick to just ONE book per question.
1. One book that changed your life.
I Like This Poem: A Collection of Best-loved Poems Chosen by Children for Other Children in Aid of the International Year of the Child, published by Puffin Books in 1979, and edited by Kaye Webb. This was a hand-me-down from my brother and sister, so pages were already loose by the time I inherited it at 7. The very first poem in the first section (for ages 6 & 7 -- I think the book sections went up to age 13) was the witches' chant from Macbeth, the one that went "Double, double, toil and trouble,/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble." Not bad for a first lesson in poetry (and life?). This was the book that first made me think poetry was, above all things, FUN, and that I could write it. And that it was silly to put an age requirement on reading material -- which is probably why I read my sister's Harlequin Temptation books at 11...but that's another story.
2. One book you have read more than once.
A Lover's Discourse, by Roland Barthes -- because you can't read these fragments straight through just once. I first read this in 2003, in a creative/ emotional/ academic crisis, and seem to return to it every time a romantic chapter ends -- and I always find something true, something piercingly intelligent, something elegantly written. Hmm. I'd lend my copy only to people I really trust -- the ideas and heavily pencilled sets of initials in the pages' margins are both laughable and incriminating."To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not -- this is the beginning of writing."
3. One book you would want on a desert island.
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (also translated as Remembrance of Things Past) -- because it's seven volumes long, because I've never read it, because there's no better time to immerse yourself in someone's meditations on memory, time, and art, than when none of these things seem to matter.
4. One book that made you laugh.
Recently? Split Horizon, by Thomas Lux, whom I find less glib than Billy Collins, and less given to sentimentality than Stephen Dunn. There's a delight and ferocious tenderness and intelligence and, yes, accessibility, in his poems that I like. Some titles in this collection include: "I Love You Sweatheart," A Streak of Blood That Once Was a Tiny Red Spider, Pecked to Death By Swans, and Edgar Allan Poe Meets Sarah Hale (Author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb").
5. One book that made you cry.
Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, which I read for my Postcolonial Lit class two weeks ago. The climactic chapters focus on the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937, when General Trujillo wanted to cleanse his nation of the foreign laborers. The soldiers administered a linguistic test on the streets, making people say perejil, the Spanish word for parsley. The Kreyol-speaking Haitians, who could not trill their R's, would be executed. Brutal, lyrical stuff."He asked for “perejil,” but there is much more we all knew how to say. Perhaps one simple word would not have saved our lives. Many more would have to and many more will."
6. One book you wish had been written.
A guide to living as an expatriate scholar and artist, without starving or shivering in winter, without being loveless, and without losing love for your country. Written by Jose Rizal, of course, who managed to finish a medical degree, write two groundbreaking novels, travel all over Europe, love women of different nationalities, and fight for political reforms. All before returning home, before being martyred, before being made national hero. How in the world did he do this 120 years ago?
7. One book you wish had never been written.
Cop-out answer: I wouldn't wish oblivion on any book. Many problems are not the results of the books themselves, but because of the twisted intentions of the people who write them, and the blatant misreadings and manipulations of the people who read them.But look, two years ago, conservative scholars compiled a list of the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries.
8. One book you are currently reading.
One? But I leave too many bookmarks between too many pages! Fine, the double publication of The Weight of Oranges and Miner's Pond in one book then. By Anne Michaels, who will most probably be my writing mentor next year, so I want to immerse myself in her elegies and sequence poems before meeting her.
9. One book you have been meaning to read.
Sophie Calle's Exquisite Pain. I learned about her just a month ago -- Paul Auster apparently used her as inspiration for a character in his novel Leviathan. The voyeuristic impulse and "forensic qualities" in her work (she's primarily a conceptual/ installation artist obsessed with strangers' private lives, and with displaying her own) intrigue me. Here's a synopsis of the book:"When a lover failed to meet Calle as promised in a hotel in New Delhi, after she had completed a 92-day journey through the Far East, Calle was devastated. As ever, she had kept everything from that journey – photographs, ticket stubs, visas and letters – and in the book, each one is rubber-stamped counting down to the fateful day of her heartbreak. On her return to Paris, she asked a group of friends to answer the question, ‘When did you most suffer?’. Their stories of pain, each of them accompanied by a photograph, interplay with Calle’s own story and daily reflections as she gradually comes to terms with the rejection and her equilibrium is restored."
10. Tag people for this meme.
Because they haven't been tagged (or haven't answered) yet: Egay, Peachy, Jeline, Kit, Den.
Labels: books
