Book Meme

[ltmurnau]

I know I kind of slacked off with the 30 days of writing meme but eh, I got busy.
I'll get back to it.

Meanwhile, a reading meme nicked from the excellent emmabovary:

Which book has been on your shelf the longest? Coup d'etat: A Practical Handbook by Edward Luttwak. Had this around since my teens, nicked from my father's bookshelf (no idea why he had it).

What is your current read, your last read and the book you'll read next?
Current read: Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla by David Kilcullen (actually, it should be subtitled The Return of the Urban Guerrilla, and They Mean It This Time, but that's another story).
Last read: The Soldier: His Daily Life Through The Ages by Philip warner (little portraits of soldiers a few centuries apart, from Bronze Age to Ww II, all of them vaguely related to each other).
Next Read: Either Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Algeria by Alf Heggoy (a 1972 work I never heard of and found by chance) or The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Saunders.

What book did everyone like and you hated? Catcher In the Rye. What the hell was that all about?

Which book do you keep telling yourself you'll read, but you probably won't? I dunno - ever since I got a house to live in, the number of books I own but haven't read seems to be greater every year. I look at them when I go to fetch something else, and reflect there may be a few I will never ever get to.

Last page: read it first or wait till the end? Wait to the end, always..

Acknowledgements: Usually a waste of time.

Which book character would you switch places with? None; a book character has to live out the same plot over and over again, and I get to move on.

Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)? Moby Dick reminds me of my time in Japan, when I actually had time to read the whole damn thing. Though my recall of it isn't great.

Which book has been with you to the most places? I've dragged a few books with me hither and yon. I have a copy of Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis I took to Japan and back.

Used or brand new? Either.

Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book? Mmmm, no. Though the film of 1984 (the one with Richard Burton) was pretty much how I had pictured the book in my head.

Comments

[dfordoom.livejournal.com]

Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?

I find that I often prefer the movie to the book. I have a theory that great books often make poor movies but that mediocre books often make great movies.