Literary Geek

This is a bit of a filler post. New job has hammered me with work. Anyway, I was sent this on Facebook so I thought I would knock the answers out. The original instructions suggest you don't italicise your titles though you want to, but I will do so anyway.

1) What author do you own the most books by?
E.M Brent-Dyer, all of whose 62 Chalet School stories I own

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Anna & I did manage to end up with three copies of Roddy Doyle's The woman who walked into doors

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
I never really did this; in fact I cannot really remember major female characters in recent books(though this is a function of reading Powell who has no female characters)

5) What book have you read the most times in your life
I'm sure I've read many things multiple times as a child - I've definitely read E.M. Brent-Dyer, The Chalet School in Exile (it is the best) four times.

6) What was your favourite book when you were ten years old?
I obviously cannot remember this, again probably M. Weis & T. Hickman, Dragons of Autumn Twilight (but I may a year too early)

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
A. Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
V.Nabokov, Lolita

9) If you could force everyone to read one book, what would it be?
L.N. Tolstoy, War and Peace

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
It will be some obscure Asian, but probably is Roth's turn

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
I just don't care

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
I just don't care

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
none

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
One Jilly Cooper's I suspect

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Joyce, Finnegan's wake, but I didn't finish it - because it is indulgent claptrap

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
Cymbeline

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
The Russians.

18) Roth or Updike?
Roth

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
No idea

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Milton to read; Bill to see

21) Austen or Eliot?
Auten above T.S., George above both

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
D.H. Lawrence

23) What is your favourite novel?
L.N. Tolstoy, War and Peace

24) Play?
I think you're formed by your early expriences on this: and I've never forgotten Romeo & Juliet as a kid. Still my favourite

25) Poem?
I remember barely any

26) Essay?
The first essay I really read was Berlin's What's wrong with negative liberty? which I think woke me up to the possibilities of a sustained work of that type, but I suspect I wouldn't think this on rereading

27) Short story?
I forget the title, but there is a wonderful story by Asimov about entropy and ends with the words 'let there be light'. Great.

28) Work of nonfiction?
P.L. Fermor, Mani

29) Who is your favourite writer?
P.L. Fermor

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Of the major literary fiction lot, I think McEwan is overpraised and lack substance

31) What is your desert island book?
If I could take anything at all I would take a the Talmud to really keep me busy. It's the though of running of things to read that frightens me

32) And... what are you reading right now?
I. Asimov, The Gods themselves