Friday Five(ish)

[eruthros]

1. What is the first book you remember reading?

By myself, darned if I can remember. (The first book my sister read was Hop on Pop.) With my dad, I read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Hound of the Baskervilles, and Danny the Champion of the World in the first grade, but I can't remember the order.

2. What is your favorite book?

Owch. The one I reread most is probably either Gaudy Night by DLS or one of the Guards books by PTerry.

3. Who is your favorite author?

At this exact and precise moment in time, Emma Bull. Ask me again tomorrow.

4. Pick up the nearest book (magazine or any available printed material will do). Turn to page 24 (or the closest to it). Go to the 7th line. What is it?

"That you will be shortly in for tea." [Dragons in the Waters, Madeleine L'Engle, still on my bedside table from my last visit home, when I was doing Childrens Book Comfort Reading]

5. If you could be any character in literature, who would you be?

Archie Goodwin, because that I could go swing dancing, be generally cool, and irritate policemen in fedoras. Or Vetinari -- I did always used to want to be Vetinari. I would like to meet LPW but not be him (I'm anti-PTSD, personally), and I would like to be Harriet Vane if I felt I could do a competent job, but somehow that seems impossible.

And additions to the Friday Five by gurdonark:

6. Name ten novelists who come to your mind right off the bat as folks you love to read--no snobbery permitted:

1. Terry Pratchett
2. P.G. Wodehouse
3. Emma Bull
4. Ursula K. LeGuin
5. Rex Stout
6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. J.R.R. Tolkien
8. Laurie King
9. DLS
10. Eric Ambler

I thought of GK Chesterton, but mostly I only like his short stories, and of Oscar Wile and GBS, but mostly I only like their plays, and MFK Fisher, but mostly I only like her food writing, so.

7. Name three poets that come to mind that matter to you, no "grad seminar mugging" permitted:

1. e.e. cummings
2. Dorothy Parker
3. Gary Snyder

7a. From friede: three POEMS:

1. Gary Snyder,
It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

2. Dana Gioia, (though his politics make me wince, I adore this poem)

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain –
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

3. Adrienne Rich,
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

8. What three non-fiction books made a deep impression on you?

1. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century
2. Christensens, eds. Discovery of America and Other Myths
3. MFK Fisher, With Bold Knife and Fork

9. What three science fiction authors intrigue you this moment?

1. Larry Niven, which is shameful and embarrassing but I really like his short stories
2. Lois McMaster Bujold
3. Carol Emshwiller, if she counts as sf

10. What is the last mystery novel you read?

Either Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough (a pair of novelas) or Laurie King's A Letter of Mary, looking for the Lord Peter bit.

Also, the first sentence of the first post of each month of 2004 as a paragraph:

Not so G-yIP. I'm generally iffy on the subject of memes -- I find other people's interesting occasionally, but I rarely post them. I'm running out of things to do on the 'net while waiting for the database or for someone to give me additional work. During a conversation on Y!M with casira, the subject turned to stoppering death. So Romney, of course, wants to bring back the death penalty in Massachusetts as part of his "I'm governing a liberal state? Whatever. I don't care about my constituency. This is what I want" program. Am pathetic. So part of the reason I'm so stressed right now is medical. I just came to the lab to read a bit of fanfiction and discovered that everyone else is in here working. So I enjoyed Kas, but I didn't like a single one of the pensions in my budget there. Haircut! For those of you who were curious, this is me with short hair. So everybody and their great-uncle is going to tell you to vote today. Who, first of all, loses on the basis of Godwin's Law: the first person to mention Hitler in a non-WWII related discussion automatically loses.