Free at last, so here's a cross-posting from the book of face

You have received this note because someone thinks you are a literary geek. Copy the questions into your own note, answer the questions, and tag any friends who would appreciate the quiz, including the person who sent you this. Don't bother trying to italicize your book titles. We know you want to.


1) What author(s) do you own the most books by?
Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, William Shakespeare, J.K. Rowling, Ken Wilber

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I have three copies of The Hobbit. I have two different versions of Ulysses. Between Jacki and I, we have three copies of The Sound and the Fury. I have two copies of The Dead Zone, Christine, Thinner, and The Stand (cut paperback and uncut hardcover). Dubliners (two) + "The Dead" (three). I have a couple copies of crossover of several classic books because my mother began a subscription to a series of special edition leatherbound books from a publishing company called The Easton Press when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I am still receiving books from them. The first two I received were Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans. I have still not read the entirety of either. So I have had three copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but gave one to a friend. I have two copies of the Odyssey, two copies of the Aeneid, as many as three editions of some of Shakespeare's play, two copies of War and Peace, etc. I tend to give someone the other copy of a book when I get a new one unless I am really attached to the old edition.

3) Did it bother you that both of those questions ended with prepositions?
I didn't notice at first. It bothers me when I am writing and I cannot figure a way to not make a sentence end with a preposition.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Well, there are different kinds of love. I love cranky, bitter old men, but not at all in a sexual way. So, I fell in love with Colonel Cantwell when reading Across the River and into the Trees. If a writer writes well, I usually fall in love with the protagonist's love interest. I was definitely in love with Sarah in The Dead Zone the afternoon she and John made love in the barn. Crush that burgeoned into love for Hermione. Absolute love of unbreakable frienship for Sam Gamgee. I was madly in love with Susan, Roland's amour in Wizard and Glass. I was so madly in love with her I can't stand looking at Jae Lee's too computerized, too perfect renderings of her in those Dark Tower comics in which I have less than zero interest. I had the hots for Rosa when I read Sacrament in ninth grade. And, of course, I have it for Death. Talk about a fundamentally unworkable relationship. That's me and my draw to futility, I guess.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children)?
There are so many books I want to read, and so many books that, for one reason or another, I only make it halfway through, that I rarely read a book more than once. I have read King Lear three times, The Thief of Always twice, The Hobbit twice, A Farewell to Arms twice, Huck Finn twice, The Gunslinger twice. Short stories I often read more than twice if I love them. I love short stories. And then there are books that I keep starting over and over again. Blood Meridian, Ulysses, The Stand, The Sun Also Rises, Genesis.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
The Hobbit.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
It's been a strange year. Last summer I read Hemingway and McCarthy, so there's nothing ill to speak of, but last fall semester I took two classes I absolutely loathed. I didn't finish anything I was supposed to read as my life and mind unraveled. So though I could list a history of rhetoric at colleges in the past hundred years or a polemical book about what the goals of a composition course ought to be and what the politics are behind those decisions are, or essays by French authors I cannot stand, I will not. The worst fiction book I have read in the past ten years and probably my whole life is The DaVinci Code. The worst literary book I have tried reading since becoming a graduate student in 2007 is Lord Jim. I fucking hate Lord Jim and I fucking hate Joseph Conrad.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Well, I just finished a course on Shakespeare, so that sets the bar pretty high. King Lear? Hamlet? It's pretty tough to go up against that. I read another play called The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy and that affected me deeply. Last summer I was reading The Sun Also Rises and Blood Meridian, so that's pretty hard to beat as well. But the best book I read the entirety of and read for the first time in the past year is Watchmen.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Watchmen or The Road. For some, And the Ass Saw the Angel. But most of them have probably read the first two or all three by now.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
Last I heard, one of the people on that board had some pretty disparaging things to say about Americans and our culture, so fuck 'em.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
None. Please stop attempting to ruin great books. I don't even see my dork-stuff touched. A Sandman movie? Ugh. No thanks. American Gods? Hard to imagine. Dark Tower? Hell, no. Though if JJ Abrams and Damen Lindelof are involved, I would give it a chance. The high brow stuff I have been reading would be equally bad. There's no movie waiting to be made in Across the River and into the Trees. What makes Blood Meridian so amazing has only a little to do with the actions that occur. It would make one of the bloodiest movies ever made. I am looking forward, with slight reservation, to The Road, to movie I at first opposed, then realized John Hillcoat (The Proposition) was directing, Viggo Mortensen wasn't looking too good, and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis were doing score.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Um, Ulysses. I think they have tried it, which is ridiculous.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I've got two for you. One involved Stephen King. I was living down the street from the Boston Common at the time. I dreamt I went walking late at night, past midnight but before dawn, into the Common. I came across Stephen King. He was wearing a Red Sox cap, throwing baseballs into the air, and slugging them with a great wood bat. Every now and then you would hear a glass shatter in the distance. With the great amount of wealth he has, this was no problem. He had people who took care of that thing the next day for him. This was a meditative practice he did sometimes. He was not bothered by my intrusion. Instead, he continued tossing balls in the air and slamming them while he gave my writing advice. I do not remember much of the advice. Then, last year in the spring sometime, I had a dream with Faulkner in it. He gave me writing advice, too. Good advice, and a couple book suggestions, too, which I am going to get started on finally. He told me to read Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim's Progress. I have his advice written down.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
When did I become an adult? 18, 21. 26, never? I read the first of Anne Rice's smutty A.N. Roquelare Sleeping Beauty books at the age of 19. Awful. Again, I read The DaVinci Code six years ago. Worst book I have ever read.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Jen said Ulysses. I could almost agree with her, but I read much of Finnegans Wake. It is a book insofar as it is constituted of pages with black markings and discernible letters all over them, occasionally making words that are known to the English speaking person and words that are made of two or more words from languages or names one may know. But it is not a novel, a poem, a play, a non-fiction book or any other form you might know. It is its own thing: Finnegans Wake. Even reading a whole book on it by Umberto Eco, and buying and reading parts of two other books on it, A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake and Joyce's Book of the Dark, I still got absolutely nothing out of it. I deeply love Joyce but am at this time incapable of giving a damn about the final book he wrote. I think I will use it as bedtime lullaby reading for my children one day. In philosophy, the most difficult book I've read is Totality and Infinity by Levinas.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespearean play you've seen?
I have not seen that much theater, something I am working on with Jacki. I also do not like watching things I have not read yet, something I am personally working on. For example, I will watch Benjamin Button without having read the Fitzgerald story.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
And now begins a series of shocking revelations. I have not read the Russians. I have begun Hadji Murád, but that is it. This is something I have been getting around to for a long time. I thought I would finally get the chance in Graduate School, but my department does not allow for the reading of anything in translation, unless the chair of the graduate program is teaching it, and then we can read every willfully obscure, onanistic French fuck ever to set pen to page. So there's your answer. I am sure I will like the Russians, when I get to them, more than the French. Though I love Antoine de St. Exupery and eventually came away with something profound after wrestling with Levinas for a few months. The jury's out on Foucault. I like him a lot more than some of his contemporaries. I am going to try to continue reading him. And I have not read Camus yet, something I am planning on getting to this summer.

18) Roth or Updike?
Haven't read either yet. Oh, wait, I did read A & P. I like A & P.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Haven't read either. What?! The What is the What.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Was Milton for awhile, now it's definitely Shakespeare.

21) Austen or Eliot?
I know this refers to George Eliot, not T.S., so I cannot answer it. I have read neither.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
See the past several questions. That, and that I haven't read the entirety of The Bible, and that I haven't read Moby Dick, and that I haven't read Othello, and that I haven't finished some books I have lead most people to believe I have, and that I haven't finished reading some books and series of books that I've gotten my friends into reading.

23) What is your favorite novel?
Impossible. When I was a kid, it was The Hobbit. Then it was Watchers. Starting around seventh grade, it was The Vampire Lestat. Then it was It. Then it was Imajica. Then it was The Scarlet Letter. Then it was One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then it was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Then it was The Lord of the Rings. Then it was American Gods. Then I barely read any fiction for years. Then I read a bunch of Harry Potter and Stephen King that I loved, but none of which qualified as favorite novel ever. Then it was The Road. Then it was And the Ass Saw the Angel. Then it was Across the River and into the Trees. What will it be next?

24) Play?
King Lear.

25) Poem?
Another hard one. A few favorites: Song of Myself. St. Kevin and the Blackbird. Interrogation at the Womb Door. Four Quartets is my favorite book of poetry. I'm not going further than that.

26) Essay?
What really constitutes an essay? Can any article in a magazine be an essay? Can any piece of literary criticism be an essay? Can any postmodern exercise in self-titillation be an essay? What about things our students write that we find very satisfying? I am not passionate about essays as a classification of literature, though I am becoming increasingly passionate about literary criticism. I dabbled around in last years Best American Essays of 2007 collection, edited by recently departed Dave Foster Wallace, and didn't find anything that pleased.

Here's a few I enjoy: Poe's essay on the unity of effect in a short story, "On a Florida Key" by E.B. White, "Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "What is an Author?" by Foucault, "The WOrd Made Flesh" and "The Secret Life of the Love Song" by Nick Cave, "Nothing Under the Sun: Nada, Light, and the Grace of God in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises" by Mark W. Bellomo, and especially "Integral Art and Literary Theory, Parts 1 and 2" by Ken Wilber, collected in his book The Eye of Spirit. What I remember most is him writing about a painting Van Gogh made of shoes and Heidegger's misreading and projection on that painting. What Wilber informed me about that painting laid the gorundwork for me to suddenly become overcome looking at the painting in the Met, where I began, inexplicably to myself, to weep before it.

27) Short story?
Here's the good stuff. "Cathedral," Raymond Carver. "Teddy" and "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor," J.D. Salinger. "Young Goodman Brown" and "Ethan Brand: An Abortive Romance" Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "The Battler," "Soldier's Home," "Indian Camp," "Now I Lay Me," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway. "Araby" and "The Dead" by James Joyce. "The Deluge at Norderney" and "The Old Chevalier" by Isak Dinesen. "Smith of Wootton Major," by J.R.R. Tolkien. "Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo," The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," and "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" by Gabriel García Márquez. "Troll Bridge," "Murder Mysteries," "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories," "Snow, Glass, Apples," October in the Chair," "Bitter Grounds," and "Forbidden Brides f the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire," by Neil Gaiman. "William Wilson" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Midnight Meat Train" and "In the Hills, The Cities" by Clive Barker. ""The Reach," "The Monkey," "Children of the Corn," "The Last Rung on the Ladder" "1408," "Everything's Eventual," by Stephen King. And the two most recent additions: "Best New Horror" and especially "20th Century Ghost" by Joe Hill, who happens to be Stephen King's son and is trying to carry on in the name of his father, but to maybe improve what he did, in the same way Nick Cave, Jeff Buckley, and arguably Jesus have (as Nick Cave argues in "The Flesh Made Word."

Finally, I leave it to you to decide whether Go Down, Moses is a short story collection. I would include "The Fire and The Hearth," at least, if it is a short story collection, but I do not think it is. Others argue In Our Time is not a short story collection. I love In Our Time, I think it's thematic, it obviously has several stories with Nick Adams (as do later short story collections by EH), but I think you can take a story out of it, read it, and not miss the entire point of the story. Furthermore, if it is one thematic more-than-a-short-story-collection book, putting "My Old Man" in there is a huge mistake.

28) Work of nonfiction?
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber. That I have never finished the book is irrelevant.
Some others I have enjoyed. On Writing by Stephen King. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Chronicles: Volume 1 by Bob Dylan. Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger. Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises by H.R. Stoneback.

I am currently enjoying Will in the World and Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt a lot.

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Top Five: Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King. Neil Gaiman was in the top five for a long time, but he's losing hold. He's still in the top ten, though.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
That's a difficult question. I am hesitant to answer, though "overrated people" lists are frequently on my mind. I am in part hesitant because I have not read a lot of the authors who are living today that people seem to love. I did attempt reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and thought it sucked ass for a host of reasons. So he's up there. Jen was so bold as to list Chuck Palahnuik, her own favorite author. I do think he is overrated, but I also enjoyed teaching Fight Club to my students last year. No one is claiming Dan Brown is the new Joyce, but I think he is incredibly overrated on even a beach read level of aesthetic gauges. He is incompetent at crafting characters, at providing a rewarding or even shocking ending, making a plot that holds, writing a compelling sentence or a beautiful description, making me feel any kind of suspense and real danger, adequately playing with any of the huge matrices of meaning he tries to bring into his work, etc.

Okay, here's a ballsier, more shocking answer. I have tried again and again to get into Ray Bradbury's work. I am so resistant to the possibility that I may not love an author I feel so totally expected to love that I am still believing that I will get the right book or try again at the right time and discover how awesome he truly is. I do think he has some marks of a great writer. But I am yet to finish reading anything he has written. So I might say Bradbury.

31) What is your desert island book?
I would bring a book that is huge that I wouldn't mind using to start fires. So I'll go with one I already burned years ago. The Faerie Queen, by Edmund Spenser.

32) And... what are you reading right now?
Right now, the semester just ended. It's a transitional time. Do I jump into some light fare? Do I keep reading what I was reading? Etc. So, at the moment I am reading Julius Caesar, the last scheduled book for Studies in Shakespeare that Olsen cut. I am continuing to read Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt. I am returning to reading Cormac McCarthy's first novel The Orchard Keeper, which I began just before the semester reached the point where any extracurricular reading is an impossibility. I also left myself toward the end of the first half of Joe Hill's debut collection 20th Century Ghosts, so I will return to that. The Book of Matthew. And I'm in the middle of reading an interview with Dylan in Rolling Stone, which I am reading for the first time in years.

Now, I am going to add one more question to this list, because 33 is a much better number than 32.

33) What do you plan on reading this summer?

Before I answer, let me say this: I always "plan" on reading ten times as much as I end up reading. It is my job at this point in life to read slowly and write about or teach what I read. So when the summer comes, sometimes I am too busy playing guitar, hiking, swimming, working non-academic jobs, watching all the movies I put off watching, drinking without having to worry about not being clear-headed enough to write my paper, and so on to actually accomplish what I set out to read. So here's a bunch of books I am thinking about reading or reading again this summer.

I Am Legend, Duel by Richard Matheson
The Fall by Albert Camus
Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
From Hell by Alan Moore
Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
As many Cormac McCarthy novels in chronological order as I can or feel like.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (haven't read it yet!)
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Moby Dick, or, The Whale by Herman Mellville
Hadi Murád by Leo Tolstoy
the next two -thirds of Christine, by Stephen King

and you know what, maybe I will finally jump back into The Dark Tower and finish it already.

and maybe something by this Ellis fellow who I hear writes such tremendous comics.