Passing the Book Torch

Maria of Alembic has passed the stick along to me for this book meme.

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Since this involves memorizing an entire book and I’d have no hope ever of doing that for the 2005 Baseball Prospectus which would be my first choice, I’ll take Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Yes, lots. Sargeant Angua, the female werewolf on the Watch in Terry Pratchett’s Ankh Morpork, and Stephen Maturin of the O’Brian series come to mind as the most recent.

The last book you bought is?

The Zen of CSS Design and CSS Cookbook

What are you currently reading?

Faithful, an account by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan of the 2004 Boston Red Sox which I need to finish by Opening Day (Sunday); Enemies of Promise by Lindsay Waters; Behind the Curve, a sailing whodunit by Steven Chance, to whom I’m related and would otherwise not be reading it at all; The Zen of CSS Design; Queen Mother by Penelope Mortimer which I started at DocRoc’s and which is an astonishingly gripping account of the fall of an empire; Jingo by Terry Pratchett; and Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I may give up on the Chance pretty soon, though I’m told it contains a reference to my grandparents in a slightly salacious way. I just can’t plod my way through till I get there. Oh, there’s another one, it was at the bottom of the pile and never quite got finished: Starhawk’s Earth Path.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

Since we’re all going to be on the desert island and everyone else already has the Bible, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the collected Shakespeare, I’ll bring a natural history of greater Oceania or whereever the island is, complete works of Chaucer, the Divine Comedy, Proust, and Cervantes.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

DocRoc, because she reads widely and well; Chris R., because she does too; and Chris Clarke, because I know the answers are going to be so unlike mine and will, I hope, include paleontology and things. He seems awfully busy these days, though, exposing the tears in our civic fabric.