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Ex Libris

Friday, 25 August, 2006

I have not blogged Larissa's book meme because I've been slack. Well, it's not only that I've been slack but also because the meme frustrates me. It's almost entirely composed of closed questions and therefore, in a sense, my answers will not mean anything. What difference does it make if I tell you that my favourite Austen is Persuasion or that the writer I would most like to emulate is A.S. Byatt? Do you care about the fact that I will always try to get Harry Potter in hardcover but I'll wait patiently for eight months for the latest Guy Gavriel Kay novel to come out in paperback? What possible difference does it make to your knowledge of me when the meme does is tell you the fact but not the Why behind it?

As I was brushing my teeth this evening, thinking of 31 Songs, it struck me that the relationship between people and books is so much different to the relationship between people and songs on a temporal level. It may take you a couple of months to finish a book (because, let's face it, no one has time to read any more—not even me and I get paid to read) but you may only read the book once. It will entertain you for a season and then it is gone. The book that stays with you—not just in your mental space in terms of the ideas or the imagery or the language, but also in terms of the number of times you return to it—is a rare volume indeed.

Furthermore, while songs can bring to mind the essence of times past—the actions you were engaged in (riding trains from Sydney to Wollongong, listening to Jars of Clay's first platinum album on my walkman back in the days when it was done to tape your CDs onto cassette), the environment you were in (summer and the laziness of the university campus with its rolling lawns, seagulls and baby rabbits, the shadows lengthening across the grass in the afternoons, the majority of the student body away on vacation, reading Peter Pan and Strange Objects with a lecturer who comes out of retirement once a year just to take this class), the people you were with (that opinionated education student who always spoke up in class but spouted nothing but waffle), and the emotions you were feeling at the time (fatigue, stress, languor, grim resignation in the face of essay-writing and take-home exams)—books are not necessarily so autobiographical. They don't weave themselves into your emotions and psyche the way that songs do. They convey information, they entertain, they disseminate ideas, but re-reading Plutarch's The Rise and Fall of Athens may not necessarily evoke the experience of doing the HSC, and though I've never read The Pickwick Papers, I don't think I've ever read a book that's made me feel hungry. (That was an Anne of Green Gables reference if you missed it.)

But, as Greg says, books are highly influential in shaping a person's ideas and even, perhaps, changing their minds. Worldviews can slip in under the radar in the innocuous guise of fiction, and, before you know it, you're wholeheartedly agreeing to the doctrine of total depravity from just having read Wuthering Heights.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, here's the meme:

One book to rule them all

1. One book that changed your life: Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis);
2. One book that you've read more than once: The Little Prince (Antoine Saint-Exupéry);
3. One book you'd want on a desert island: Besides the Bible? The Blue Sword (Robin McKinley);
4. One book that made you laugh: Mort (Terry Pratchett) (I own two copies of this book. One of them is hardcover but it's 3cm x 3cm x 1cm—truly “pocket-sized”_;
5. One book that made you cry: Thunderwith (Libby Hathorn);
6. One book that you wish had been written: The book that Greg wants to write one day for his kids;
7. One book that you wish had never been written: A Fringe of Leaves (Patrick White);
8. One book you're currently reading: 31 Songs (Nick Hornby);
9. One book you've been meaning to read: The Gagging of God (D.A. Carson);
10. Now tag five people: Ah, no, don't think I will.

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