Book meme: from the princess of pub quizzes
October 4th, 2006
Once upon a time I shared a rickety east-London house with five twenty-something lasses. We were each broke, in debt and buried by bookshelves (old stacked-up empty wine-boxes from City merchants) twice the size of our wardrobes (cheap hanging rails from the fashion market). It felt oddly voyeuristic to browse the others’ books… I knew that mine were a catalogue of hopes (things I wanted to know), guilts (things I wished I knew already) and dreamlands I wanted to escape into. A bit like an underwear draw, really.
I remember vividly the white-spined snoopy comics packing-out the front room, the silver-blue oxford classics stacked along the dresser, and the postmodern Introducing… series brimming out of the bathroom fireplace. But I browsed and thumbed only hesitantly and sheepishly.
What luck, then, that there’s such things as Book Memes. And that friends, if you ask them nicely, can be persuaded to divulge the deepest secrets of their bookworlds. Because it’s one thing to see the creased and worn silver-blue spines, but quite another to know what they’ve meant.
This, then, is the first guest book meme. From the Princess of Pub Quizzes (she can petition me for another name anytime)…..
One book that changed your life
My usual answer to this question is Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which I read when I was 16 and which moved me deeply with its poetic meditation on aestheticism and the continued need for engagement with the mess of life. However, it would be, I suppose, a dull meme if Hesse swept the board so I offer instead Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting which I came across at around the same time and read in the space of a single train journey. It’s a difficult thing to classify - it’s at once fiction, history and philosophy - but it felt as though I was less reading it than it was reading me - stripping away all of my assumptions about reality and humanity and forcing me to re-evaluate everything around me. I sincerely felt as I finished it that I had become a different and, I hoped, more sensitive person. It stays with me fifteen years on as an increasingly nebulous sense memory, since I’m scared to revisit it, but an immensely precious one nonetheless.
One book you have read more than once
Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve read this; it’s the ultimate comfort book for me and I’ll often pick it up to read a few pages when
Book meme: from the princess of pub quizzes
October 4th, 2006
Once upon a time I shared a rickety east-London house with five twenty-something lasses. We were each broke, in debt and buried by bookshelves (old stacked-up empty wine-boxes from City merchants) twice the size of our wardrobes (cheap hanging rails from the fashion market). It felt oddly voyeuristic to browse the others’ books… I knew that mine were a catalogue of hopes (things I wanted to know), guilts (things I wished I knew already) and dreamlands I wanted to escape into. A bit like an underwear draw, really.
I remember vividly the white-spined snoopy comics packing-out the front room, the silver-blue oxford classics stacked along the dresser, and the postmodern Introducing… series brimming out of the bathroom fireplace. But I browsed and thumbed only hesitantly and sheepishly.
What luck, then, that there’s such things as Book Memes. And that friends, if you ask them nicely, can be persuaded to divulge the deepest secrets of their bookworlds. Because it’s one thing to see the creased and worn silver-blue spines, but quite another to know what they’ve meant.
This, then, is the first guest book meme. From the Princess of Pub Quizzes (she can petition me for another name anytime)…..
One book that changed your life
My usual answer to this question is Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which I read when I was 16 and which moved me deeply with its poetic meditation on aestheticism and the continued need for engagement with the mess of life. However, it would be, I suppose, a dull meme if Hesse swept the board so I offer instead Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting which I came across at around the same time and read in the space of a single train journey. It’s a difficult thing to classify - it’s at once fiction, history and philosophy - but it felt as though I was less reading it than it was reading me - stripping away all of my assumptions about reality and humanity and forcing me to re-evaluate everything around me. I sincerely felt as I finished it that I had become a different and, I hoped, more sensitive person. It stays with me fifteen years on as an increasingly nebulous sense memory, since I’m scared to revisit it, but an immensely precious one nonetheless.
One book you have read more than once
Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve read this; it’s the ultimate comfort book for me and I’ll often pick it up to read a few pages when