book meme musings

[waider]

I was discussing the book meme with Lockhart over the weekend, and came to the following conclusions:

• I can't remember much of what I read 20 years ago. I can name three books that I know I read before I was 12 - Islands in the Sky (thanks, Lock!), The Alligator and his Uncle Tooth, and The Hobbit - but I was a member of a book club, and we had a fairly crammed bookshelf in the school, and my dad is a marginally less avid reader than I am, so I've always had a slew of books available to me for as long as I can remember, but I can't recall the individual titles.
• I don't think I've ever really been shocked by a book. Some of Robert Anton Wilson's stuff opened my head a bit more than I expected, and Zen and the Art... had a pretty big effect on me, but I read The Wasp Factory and American Psycho, to name but two, without blinking, so to speak.
• I'll read pretty much anything. I have a small stack of books on my pile at the moment that I've been reading for at least a year now; Burrough's The Soft Machine, a miserable sociology book called The Hacker Ethic, a Baudrillard title, and a book on the workings of the brain, all of which have stalled for various reasons. But I've always finished books, no matter how long it's taken - Godel, Escher, Bach took me two years, and I've never reread it fully - and no matter how distasteful I find the books I'll stick with 'em until I'm done.
• My current sense for what I like in a book is pretty much the same as it was 20 years ago, with a single exception: P.J.O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell made me laugh in 1992, and disgusted me several years later with its parochialism. And that was before I started following American politics.

And that's all the memery you're getting.

Comments

[opadit.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've ever really been shocked by a book.

That's what I keep thinking. It's not books that shock me, but real-life experiences.