Evidently, I’ve Decided to Make Every Post Nine Million Words Long Now

After a three-day weekend, it’s not good to work too hard. You have to ease back into things so as not to cramp up. Therefore, a meme! Or a quiz. Maybe it’s a questionnaire. Possibly a poll. In any event, I saw this over at The Reluctant Grownup, which is Gillian’s lovely blog that I read but never comment on because I don’t have a Windows Live ID, and frankly signing up for one more thing that requires a password will be the final push that drives me over the edge. I’ll end up like that dude on Lost in the mental hospital with Hurley, repeating, “4 8 15 16 23 42″ over and over until it’s time for my dopamine receptor blocker.

Anyway. Onward.

1. What author do you own the most books by?

After consulting my Nerd Girl Book Database (NGBD), the answer is a tie. At 32 books each, it’s Beverly Cleary and Larry McMurtry. I have almost every book that Cleary has ever written, including Leave it to Beaver. You probably think I’m making that up. Behold:

Needless to say, it was not her best work. If I had to pick her best book, it would be one of the Henry and Ribsy books, I think. I know everyone loves Ramona the Pest, but a boy and his dog are hard to beat. I also have a lot of fondness for both Otis Spofford and Ellen Tebbits. As far as I know, the only Cleary books I don’t have are two more tie-ins with Leave it to Beaver, which I might eventually get for the sake of completeness, but otherwise, I’m not that excited about them.

As for McMurtry, I don’t have every book he’s written because he’s ridiculously prolific. He’s like the Joyce Carol Oates of Western fiction. I don’t equally love everything he’s written, but in general, I like his historic fiction better than his contemporary fiction and his contemporary fiction better than his non-fiction. “Fiction” starts to sound weird if you say it too many times. If you have not read him, read Lonesome Dove certainly; that’s the one the won the Pulitzer and it has one of the best last lines of any book ever written. If you like it, read the sequel, Streets of Laredo, which is a better book, but only read the prequels if you really loved both of the later books or if you’re hopelessly retentive since the prequels are just okay. In general, I like McMurtry’s sequels better than the originals because he seems to have more of an affinity for his characters as they age. For example, The Last Picture Show is the one that got all the acclaim, but Duane’s Depressed will break your heart. Similarly, Some Can Whistle is the last in a trilogy and it is so melancholy it will make you want to kill yourself, but in a good way.

2. What book do you own the most copies of?

And this is exactly why I need the NGBD. I have, on a couple of occasions, purchased a book I already own. I’ve since purged the multiple copies, so I guess now the only book I have more than one of is the dictionary.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

No. “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition” is not now and has never been a rule of English. The misconception that it is likely stems from the fact that there is a similar type of rule in Latin, and back when Latin was still taught in schools, many teachers decided that Latin, being mostly obsolete and therefore only available to the educated, was superior to English, which any old slob can use, and thus began misapplying rules of Latin to English in order to class things up. They did this despite the fact that Latin is an Italic language and English is Germanic, meaning that using Latin rules for English is no more justified than using rules of Sanskrit on Swedish. Even after most schools ceased teaching Latin, generations of teachers repeated the error. The rule is necessary in Latin because Latin has very few other rules pertaining to word order; as a result, a Latin sentence ending with a verb in prepositional form is ambiguous at best and nonsensical at worst. This is not the case in English. An English sentence that ends with a preposition is not only grammatically correct, it is also often the most elegant construction. Syntactic rules arise organically out of the language itself; they can’t be forced on from the outside. This is why you see very few job openings for prescriptive grammarians; they’re wrong about a lot of things and also they’re really dull and judgmental.

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

I’m not even in love with any actual characters.

5. What book have you read the most times in your life?

I’ve read a lot of books more than once, so I don’t really know. To Kill a Mockingbird, maybe.

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

It’s hard to remember what I was reading when I was ten because I’m, like, a hundred now, but I’m going to guess Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder, about the early life of her husband Almanzo Wilder, or From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg. I can never look at coins in a fountain without thinking of this book.

7. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?

The Total Woman by crazy-ass Marabel Morgan. I only read it so I could get a blog post out of it, and even though it only took an afternoon to read, it’s an afternoon of my life that would have better been spent pounding on my thumb with a hammer.

8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

I didn’t read anything I really loved this year, but I guess I would go with Company by Max Barry. It’s a dark satire of Corporate America, in which a missing morning donut may have unforeseen consequences.

9. If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?

Clockers by Richard Price. Regarding a murder followed by an unlikely confession and told from the alternating points of view of a crack dealer and a homicide detective, Clockers is meticulously plotted and constructed. The revelation when it comes, comes to the main characters and the readers almost simultaneously, and the ending is oddly hopeful. In many ways, it’s an amazing book; if you’ve seen the movie, which was not great, don’t let it put you off reading the book.

10. Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?

Am I up for it? If I’m not up for it, then I don’t care who wins.

11. What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall. At the age of seven, Edgar is run over by the mailman’s truck and then abandoned by his parents. It’s a comedy. Well, a black comedy. But it’s quirky and interesting and tragic and only a little sappy, and would probably make a nice movie that would get released in the fall when no one goes to the movies.

12. What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Although I should pick a great book by a great writer that could potentially be ruined by a bad filmmaker, I’m instead going to go with anything by Sophie Kinsella, because I find her success to be completely undeserved and I don’t want her to make any more money off her total lack of originality than she already has. On the one hand, you have to love bad writers who sell a lot of books, even if they’re terrible books, because that’s what keeps the publishing industry afloat. On the other hand, it’s just annoying when people make a lot of money off of crap.

13. Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

When I was in college and taking a symbolic logic class, I had a dream involving the living playing cards from the garden of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. Instead of living cards, they were the symbols used in the proofs I had to do for class, and they arranged themselves to make a giant proof of some syllogism or other. Although it sounds like the kind of dream you would only have after dropping acid, Lewis Carroll was a mathemetician and a logician, so I think that was the basis of the dream, although, yes, it’s still pretty weird.

14. What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?

I’m a sucker for any Christmas book, so one year I picked up something called The Night Before Christmas, which was a collection of romantic short stories with a Christmas theme by different authors, ostensibly in the chick lit mode, but in actuality, it was more soft-core porn than anything else. They were all exactly the same: woman want man, man no want woman, woman show man her vagina, man trapped! man propose marriage, woman win! It was gross.

15. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. Even Kant himself deemed it unreadable.

16. What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you’ve seen?

I’ve only read Shakespeare but have never seen any of his plays performed. Not even as a movie, come to think of it.

17. Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

In terms of literature, the Russians. In terms of salad dressing, also the Russians. Actually, I’m not sure I’ve read any French authors, aside from parts of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which, if nothing else, is a fantastic sleep aid.

18. Roth or Updike?

I’ve never read any Roth, so Updike!

19. David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

I’ve never read any Eggers, so Sedaris!

20. Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

Shakespeare, I guess, although I do like some of Milton’s sonnets. And Chaucer can be quite funny, even though the Middle English is a bitch. So, I don’t know.

21. Austen or Eliot?

Eliot. Silas Marner, in particular.

22. What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

Honestly, I’m more embarrassed by some of the things that I have read than by anything I haven’t read. There are a lot of books in the world. I can’t read all of them.

23. What is your favorite novel?

I don’t have a favorite. There are different books that were important to me at different times of my life, but there’s nothing I would single out as my all-time favorite.

24. Play?

I don’t really have a favorite play either, but I’m going to say M. Butterfly because I saw an absolutely horrendous community theater production of it, in which the actor playing French Diplomat Rene Gallimard made the unusual artistic choice of giving him a Jamaican accent.

25. Poem?

Nope!

26. Essay?

Nuh uh.

27. Short story?

“Primo Doesn’t Take Back Bottles Anymore,” by Darrell Lum. Anthologized in Best of Bamboo Ridge and Pass On, No Pass Back. I read it twenty years ago, and I still feel a little stab in my heart when I think of the last time Rosa took the empties back to the brewery.

28. Work of non-fiction?

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. It almost makes me want to walk the Appalachian Trail. Almost.

29. Who is your favorite writer?

I’ve mentioned some of them already: Cleary, McMurtry, Price. I’d also add Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Nevil Shute, John Irving (if I ignore everything he’s written in the last ten or twelve years), Frank Norris, Bernard Malamud, and Helen Fielding.

30. Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

I don’t know if I’d call her the most overrated writer alive today, but I don’t really get all the whoop whoop over Alice Sebold.

31. What is your desert island book?

The dictionary. I do love reading the dictionary.

32. And … what are you reading right now?

Writing a Novel by John Braine. I don’t want to discuss it.