1. Hardcover or paperback, and why?
Paperback. I love the way the pages feel when you split the book and let the pages fall flat against your hand, your thumbs holding the pages in the place. Your open palms hold the book lightly, as if you are handing a plate to someone. Let the pages glide back and forth. On my bookshelf, though, there are plenty of hardcovers, mostly of books I couldn't wait for: The Fifth Book of Peace, Maxine Hong Kingston; Four Seasons in Five Senses, David Mas Masumoto; My Country Versus Me, Wen Ho Lee with Helen Zia; Drive: The First Quartet, Lorna Dee Cervantes.
2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
Lee's. I would have massive new and used sections of political science, Asian and Asian Pacific American history, politics, and biographies, poetry for days, and an enormous section of literary magazines of all sizes and shapes. There would also be good coffee and a circular fireplace. The employees would helpful and not full of themselves or bitter.
3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…
This is not verbatim probably, since I am writing it from memory and do not have the book in front of me. But one of my all-time favorites is from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
When life gets tough and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and drive like a bastard from Barstow to Las Vegas, to bask, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun.
4. The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be…
Pablo Neruda
5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except for the SAS survival guide, it would be…
The Bible
6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…
could produce authentic replications of the author's voice reading the text.
7. The smell of an old book reminds me of…
Trees plotting the revolution.
8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…
I don't know.
9. The most overestimated book of all time is…
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
10. I hate it when a book…
gets burned.
*If you have never finished War and Peace, you're it.
4 comments:
Well, I knew that my failure to finish War and Peace would get me in trouble sooner or later...
1. Paperback. (Easier to hold and to carry.)
2. The Mixed Metaphor
3. "Bring to the cup of this new life/your old buried sorrows." (Pablo Neruda in "Canto General."
4. Sappho. (Neruda would be good, though.)
5. "Selected Essays" by John Berger.
6. (I can't come up with anything better than your idea, the gadget that replicates the author's voice reading the text. That would be awesome.)
7. (Likewise, your answer "Trees plotting the revolution" -- can't do any better than that.)
8. The lyre Sappho played when she sang her poems.
9. Anything by Martha Stewart.
10. I hate it when a book I want to read is a) out of print, or b) not in paperback yet.
Lyle, I love your Neruda quote. & yes, sometimes it seems to take forver for the paperback version! thanks for playin.
agree with #6. liked your answers!!
thanks, jenni! hope all's well out there. dug your interview w/ collins.
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