The Book Meme

This idea comes from the English conservative political blogger Iain Dale; books being so important in my life, I thought I wd fill out these questions for myself, and I invite your answers to these same questions. You can answer privately or here in the public space, I don't mind. :)

1. Name one book that changed your life.
I can't say that a book ever has. Certainly my life would have been poorer without 'I, Claudius' by Robert Graves and 'Europe: a history' by Norman Davies, as much as any books I can think of.

2. One book you've read more than once.
So many of them... if I love a book, I read it again and again, and I can discover new things in it every time. One which I picked up again for the bazillionth time recently is 'Lords of the horizons: a history of the Ottoman Empire' by Jason Goodwin. Not written like a 'normal' history at all; more like a novel or a play, with a cast of bizarre characters and humorous, macabre anecdotes, not chained too tightly to chronology, but leaving you with a genuine feeling of having lived through a human experience.

3. One book you'd want on a desert island.
'The Isles', another Norman Davies history. I only understand Britain and England (two different things) when I am far away from it. And Davies' writing talent makes his books endlessly re-readable.

4. One book that made you laugh.
'Humorous' authors I like, such as P J O'Rourke or Hunter S Thompson, are just as often downright astonishing and occasionally deeply serious. For sheer fun, I like Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a small island'; this American lived in Britain for 30 years, and retains a sense of how lovably absurd us Brits can be.

5. One book that made you cry.
'Margrave of the marshes' by John Peel; this witty, unpretentious, sweet guy dominated British music for 40 years. Why do the best people always die before their time? Also 'Wild swans' by Jung Chang; how brutal life in China has been for most of the past 100 years.

6. One book you wish you'd written.
'Foucault's pendulum' by Umberto Eco; such a mix of ideas, humour, intellectual challenge, and (a nice change from this author) some characters I can identify with. If I could do something like this...

7. One book you wish had never been written.
Anything 'written' by a reality-show contestant or a model, for starters. :) Otherwise hard to think... even reading 'Venus in furs' by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or 'Juliette' by the Marquis de Sade, though extremely morally challenging and at times repulsive, serve the function of making us go into the darkest and most dangerous hidden corners of our personality. If you want to read something you probably wouldn't normally want to read, try 'Chopper' by Mark Read; a former hitman from the Australian underworld details his crimes - but more importantly, subjects himself to rigorous self-examination as to why he (and others) behave in such a way.

8. One book you're currently reading.
'Collapse' by Jared Diamond; how human behaviour affects environmental change, and vice versa. And 'The golden age of myth and legend' by Thomas Bulfinch, a collection of the Greco-Roman myths (with others) from the Victorian period which greatly influenced that time's literature and thinking.

9. One book you've been meaning to read.
'Don Quijote' by Cervantes; lying around in both English and Spanish for years, I can't quite get started with it.... And 'American gods' by Neil Gaiman - all the evidence indicates he's one of our era's best storytellers. I must finally find out for myself.

10. Now tag five people.
Indres, Knur, George, brother, Tanya. I doubt whether they will answer, though. ;)