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Book meme
Via Jim Henley, a book meme:
- One book that changed your life: Without question, that would be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. This book literally changed how I saw the world -- for days after I read it, angles were askew and colors were different, because everything I looked at I saw through the new frames of reference Ellison had created.
- One book you have read more than once: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Harold Bloom, in his book Genius, kind of hints that he's glad that Austen died young, because otherwise she might have ended a greater writer than Shakespeare, and that would have broken his brain.
- One book that made you laugh: Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest. An alternate history where every word Shakespeare wrote was literally true, to the point that all the aristocrats in the book spoke in iambic pentameter.
- One book that made you cry: Ian Buruma's Bad Elements, especially the chapter on Singapore. When I read Havel's The Power of the Powerless, Havel's honest grocer is a balding Chinese man named Chia Thye Poh.
- One book you wish had been written: I wish Austen had finished Sanditon.
- One book you wish had never been written: This is tough. Maybe Marx's Capital. Pre-Marxist socialists (cf. The Ego and Its Own) were usually a lot weirder, wilder and more interesting than post, and it's really too bad that interesting socialist thought was pretty much confined to the anarchists for a really long time.
- One book you are currently reading: Jean-Yves Girard's The Blind Spot. I really have to understand what Girard is doing with logic.
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