Book Meme: Second Part
Apr. 30th, 2021 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakStill from oracne.
17: If you owned a bookshop what would you call it?
Lebensansichten des Katers Murr ("Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr"), after E.T.A. Hoffmann's novel.
18: Which character from a book is the most like you?
Ha. Right now, I feel like a cross between Bastian Balthasar Bux from The Neverending Story (I totally would have stolen that book!) and Mary from Pride and Prejudice (overestimating my own talent, something of a know-it-all).
19: Which character from a book is the least like you?
A great many, I imagine. But let's go with the Hobbits, whom I love dearly, but see, I don't like pipes, I do love travelling, and you wouldn't want to entrust the Ring to me because I'd use it and be corrupted in no time flat.
20: Best summer read?
Actually, I don't necessarily read books set in summer times during the summer, which, I take it, this question is referring to. Also, I have trouble with calling any single book "best" of anything. All this said, here's a book I've loved reading during the summer and which is set in summer times: Her Majesty's Will by David Blixt. (Link goes to my original review after reading it.) It's delightful and silly and teams up young Shakespeare and Marlowe in a spy romp complete with main text, not sub text flirting. If you want a German requivalent, Robert Löhr's Das Erlkönig-Manöver comes to mind (Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Bettine Brentanto, Achim von Arnim, Alexander Humboldt and the most gloriously over the top Dumasian secret mission plot imaginable).
21: Best winter read?
See above re: seasonal books. But actually, there's a book set in winter - well, it starts in November, but the clue is in the title - which you can read then, or at any other time of the year, and it is one of the best books to read (or even better, to be read to - get an audio if you can, for this is poetry and demands to be read out loud by a good actor): Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen by Heinrich Heine. More about Heine and this epic satire and satirical epic here.
22: Pro or anti e-readers? Why?
Oh, I'm definitely for them for the same reason most people are, I imagine: it allows one to travel with a library without having to carry the physical weight around. This said, I still treasure the feeling of a book beneath my fingertips, and if I'm at home and have the choice, I go with a physical book more often than not.
23: Book Depository or Amazon?
This seems to be an American question. In Germany, our alternative to Amazon - well, the most accessible one - is Geniallokal, aka how you can order books online and still go via your local bookshop, supporting them instead of Amazon. I check it out first, and in most cases they have what I need (both the electronic or the physical variation), but sometimes they don't, in which case it has to be Amazon.
24: Do you prefer to buy books online or in a bookshop?
In non-pandemic times, I love browsing in bookstores. And if I need it more quickly, see above for the possibility to buy online and still support bookstores instead of Amazon.
30: Who’s your favorite author?
Does anyone doing this meme have just one of those? Seriously? I couldn't even narrow it down to one per genre. Therefore, the only one I'll name in this category is my most recent discovery in terms of poetry, whom I therefore love with a new passion, Mascha Kaléko.
31: Who’s your favorite contemporary author?
In the sense of "living author whose work I'd read independent from the genre they've chosen, or even without needing a blurb because they haven't yet disapponted me, even if I don't like all of their books to the same degree, and more often than not I really love their output", Barbara Hambly.
32: Who’s your favorite fantasy author?
See above for inability to narrow it down per genre. But fine, Neil Gaiman is definitely one of them; Barbara Hambly; Tad Williams used to be, but then he grew overindulgent.
33: Who’s your favorite SF author?
See above for narrowing it down. As a kid I actually went the classic route and read Jules Verne (who totally counts in terms of what was sci fi in his time), then Asimov (liked the robot stories, not to much the Foundation stuff) , then as a teen I had my MZB and Darkover phase. (See also last post.)
34: List five OTPs.
Mitch/Stasi (Order of the Air series, Jo Graham and Melissa Scott)
Maigrey/Derek Sagan (Star of the Guardians series, Margaret Weis)
Long John Silver/Getting Away With It (Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson)
Winnetou/Old Shatterhand (Look, I imprinted on them as a six years old!) (Karl May, Winnetou novels)
Hatschepsut/Senmut (Pauline Gedge, Child of the Morning)
oracne. 17: If you owned a bookshop what would you call it?
Lebensansichten des Katers Murr ("Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr"), after E.T.A. Hoffmann's novel.
18: Which character from a book is the most like you?
Ha. Right now, I feel like a cross between Bastian Balthasar Bux from The Neverending Story (I totally would have stolen that book!) and Mary from Pride and Prejudice (overestimating my own talent, something of a know-it-all).
19: Which character from a book is the least like you?
A great many, I imagine. But let's go with the Hobbits, whom I love dearly, but see, I don't like pipes, I do love travelling, and you wouldn't want to entrust the Ring to me because I'd use it and be corrupted in no time flat.
20: Best summer read?
Actually, I don't necessarily read books set in summer times during the summer, which, I take it, this question is referring to. Also, I have trouble with calling any single book "best" of anything. All this said, here's a book I've loved reading during the summer and which is set in summer times: Her Majesty's Will by David Blixt. (Link goes to my original review after reading it.) It's delightful and silly and teams up young Shakespeare and Marlowe in a spy romp complete with main text, not sub text flirting. If you want a German requivalent, Robert Löhr's Das Erlkönig-Manöver comes to mind (Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Bettine Brentanto, Achim von Arnim, Alexander Humboldt and the most gloriously over the top Dumasian secret mission plot imaginable).
21: Best winter read?
See above re: seasonal books. But actually, there's a book set in winter - well, it starts in November, but the clue is in the title - which you can read then, or at any other time of the year, and it is one of the best books to read (or even better, to be read to - get an audio if you can, for this is poetry and demands to be read out loud by a good actor): Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen by Heinrich Heine. More about Heine and this epic satire and satirical epic here.
22: Pro or anti e-readers? Why?
Oh, I'm definitely for them for the same reason most people are, I imagine: it allows one to travel with a library without having to carry the physical weight around. This said, I still treasure the feeling of a book beneath my fingertips, and if I'm at home and have the choice, I go with a physical book more often than not.
23: Book Depository or Amazon?
This seems to be an American question. In Germany, our alternative to Amazon - well, the most accessible one - is Geniallokal, aka how you can order books online and still go via your local bookshop, supporting them instead of Amazon. I check it out first, and in most cases they have what I need (both the electronic or the physical variation), but sometimes they don't, in which case it has to be Amazon.
24: Do you prefer to buy books online or in a bookshop?
In non-pandemic times, I love browsing in bookstores. And if I need it more quickly, see above for the possibility to buy online and still support bookstores instead of Amazon.
30: Who’s your favorite author?
Does anyone doing this meme have just one of those? Seriously? I couldn't even narrow it down to one per genre. Therefore, the only one I'll name in this category is my most recent discovery in terms of poetry, whom I therefore love with a new passion, Mascha Kaléko.
31: Who’s your favorite contemporary author?
In the sense of "living author whose work I'd read independent from the genre they've chosen, or even without needing a blurb because they haven't yet disapponted me, even if I don't like all of their books to the same degree, and more often than not I really love their output", Barbara Hambly.
32: Who’s your favorite fantasy author?
See above for inability to narrow it down per genre. But fine, Neil Gaiman is definitely one of them; Barbara Hambly; Tad Williams used to be, but then he grew overindulgent.
33: Who’s your favorite SF author?
See above for narrowing it down. As a kid I actually went the classic route and read Jules Verne (who totally counts in terms of what was sci fi in his time), then Asimov (liked the robot stories, not to much the Foundation stuff) , then as a teen I had my MZB and Darkover phase. (See also last post.)
34: List five OTPs.
Mitch/Stasi (Order of the Air series, Jo Graham and Melissa Scott)
Maigrey/Derek Sagan (Star of the Guardians series, Margaret Weis)
Long John Silver/Getting Away With It (Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson)
Winnetou/Old Shatterhand (Look, I imprinted on them as a six years old!) (Karl May, Winnetou novels)
Hatschepsut/Senmut (Pauline Gedge, Child of the Morning)
no subject
Date: 2021-04-30 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-30 02:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-30 06:00 pm (UTC)(Granted that I no longer read much new fiction, but 1) that's only been the case for the last ~10 years, and Tolkien's been my favorite author for 28 years, and 2) even if you expand the field to include nonfiction, it still holds.)
no subject
Date: 2021-05-01 09:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-01 10:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-01 12:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-01 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-02 01:46 am (UTC)Tolkien has gotten 5 published scholarly articles out of me, and the rest of the universe has gotten a grand total of 3 so far. And one of the 3 I was pressured into publishing in grad school and have now disowned (don't cite it!). Whereas I wrote all my Tolkien articles as an independent scholar, purely for love of the subject, and I remain proud of all of them.
Another data point: I have 4 bookcases, totaling ~450 books, and one entire bookcase, a quarter of my physical book collection, is devoted to the 110 books I own by or about Tolkien. (I know 450 is small as such things go, but I move every 2-3 years, I hate owning physical objects, and my book collection is a reference library of scholarly and therefore mostly extremely expensive tomes. My digital book collection is growing much faster.)
But in neither of those cases have I read every word of the writer's output.
While I can't claim to have read every word of Tolkien's output, I am actually within reach, and might actually manage it the next time I return to Tolkien scholarship. (Um. I will waive the requirement to read the index to the History of Middle-Earth and the Middle English Vocabulary cover-to-cover. :P)
The only one who even comes close for me is Homer. The Iliad is my "If you were stranded on a desert island with one book" answer, and I would rank it above any one work by Tolkien. But the collected works of Tolkien stand above the Iliad + the Odyssey. (This is leaving aside the Homeric Question, for the sake of argument.)
But it's very hard to come up with original ideas about Homer that haven't already been explored to death in 2,500 years of Homeric scholarship. So I spend more time thinking about and engaging with Tolkien, whose scholarship is only about 50 years old and more conducive to academic discoveries by a non-full-time academic such as myself.
I realize these are my very specific priorities. :) But even before I was a scholar, I was a fan, and Tolkien was the clear winner. He also, thanks to the Hobbit, wins on longevity: 28 years of sometimes pathological obsession beats Homer by about 10 years.