Morrow Planet

Having become the source for the "Fifteen Things About Books" meme, Brian tagged me to jump into the fray. I needed an excuse, so here goes:

1. Admittedly, I purchase many books more for the idea of them than (so it turns out) for the actual content. I tend to have a lot of books that are like placeholders for ideas or thoughts I want to explore later.

 

2. I moved to New York after college to join the big city book publishing world, and came home to Chicago less than a year later. I learned many unforgettable life lessons as a twenty-one-year-old in New York:

 

• that my love of that city rose in inverse proportion to my respect for the book publishing industry;

   

• that the nicest, most passionate and intelligent book lovers that work in publishing get paid the least and work the shittiest jobs, then burn out and move to other careers;

   

• that despite that last statement most publishing folk are reasonably well intentioned but hamstrung by a system that is so backward as to be almost unfixable and;

   

• that no matter how hard you try, you will get caught trying to hide out overnight in the Strand Bookstore (“Eighteen Miles of Books!”).
                       

 

3. Like others following this meme, I read more slowly than I’d like. My reasoning is that if I read faster, I could read more books – but when it comes down to it I just like to linger over sentences too much.
    
4. I am a notorious biblio-polygamist. I almost always have two or three novels, a story collection, and a couple of non-fiction titles in “active” rotation. Perhaps this is why it takes me so long to finish books?
    
5. Weekdays, I have two sacrosanct reading sessions: my lunch hour at work and right before the lights go out at night. Since G— was born, the bedtime reading has consisted largely of my wife nudging me awake to turn out the light, having fallen asleep after five pages or so.

 

6. 
   The first science fiction book I ever remember becoming utterly engrossed by was Lester Del Ray’s The Runaway Robot, borrowed from the Hawthorn Elementary school library. It was out of print even then, but my wonderful parents tracked down a copy (before the Internet, this was much harder!) and it still occupies the space fo greatest honor on my bookshelf. It wasn’t too much longer before I found Asimov’s Foundation books, and my reader’s soul left Earth orbit forever.
    
7. I stopped reading sci fi through college because I was a snooty lit major and thought it couldn’t be “literary” enough. The book that changed my mind and reminded me how fun SF can be was Dan Simmons’ Hyperion.
    
8. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves literally induced me into a panic attack while reading it alone in my old apartment one night and precipitated (?) a two-month long descent into anxiety that eventually had to be resolved with medication.
    
9. I tend to like the idea of libraries better than the actual physical spaces (hence my fascination with the Internet?)

 

10. Book that made me decide to major in literature rather than history, two-way tie: The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins, and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

 

11. The only books I’ve ever re-read, not in order:
       
          
    • Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon)

          

    • Justine (Lawrence Durell)

          

    • Catch-22 (Heller)

          

    • One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez)

          

    • Written on the Body (Winterson)

          

    • Foundation (Asimov)

          

    • The Dharma Bums (Kerouac)

          

    • Generation X and Shampoo Planet (Coupland)

          

    • The Bell Jar (Plath)

          

    • all the Chronicles of Narnia books (Lewis)

          

    • the first three Dragonlance trilogies (Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman). 

 

12. While in college, some friends and I staged a non-stop, 24-hour-a-day vocal reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. I don’t remember if we finished, though I do remember thinking, a little more than 24 hours in, that it was an incredibly bad idea. It remains my only exposure to that work.
     
13. Books that, for some inexplicable reason, are in the filing cabinet in my day-job cubicle:
       
          
    • The God Particle (Richard Cox)

          

    • Viator (Lucius Shepard)

          

    • all three His Dark Materials books (Philip Pullman)
                        

 

14. I am an incurable list maker (can you tell?), and have comprehensive, annotated lists of the books I own, have read, have borrowed, would like to read, plan to buy, plan to listen to in audio form, have started but not finished, etc. These are in a constant state of refinement and flux, sometimes kept in carefully lettered notebooks, sometimes on index cards, sometimes on the computer. The net result is that I spend more time thinking about the books I want to read than actually reading them. (reminded here of Mathews’ The Journalist…)
     
15. The ten writers who most made me who I am today (in no order):
       
          
    • Borges

          

    • Calvino

          

    • Kerouac

          

    • Winterson

          

    • CS Lewis

          

    • Thomas Merton

          

    • Kundera

          

    • David Markson

          

    • Asimov

          

    • Lafferty