1) who is one fictional character you can relate to the most? 2) if every person’s life were to be read like a book, what would your narrator’s voice sound like? describe your book’s cover. 3) given the choice to trade all your books for that one thing you want the most in this life, would you do it? if yes, what would that thing be? • The Automaton

1) who is one fictional character you can relate to the most?

2) if every person's life were to be read like a book, what would your narrator's voice sound like? describe your book's cover.

3) given the choice to trade all your books for that one thing you want the most in this life, would you do it? if yes, what would that thing be? — Asked by ledgelife

Having just learned that this set of questions has been in my Tumblr Ask inbox since time immemorial — a phrase which here means “a couple of months ago” — one wonders why it’s only now that I’ve decided to answer them. Why? Because I’m a very busy person, that’s why. And I actually find these seemingly simple questions difficult to answer. Oddly enough, when confronted with questions that do not merely ask who my favorite authors are or what books I’m currently reading, interrogatives centered on books and my notoriously deep-seated relationship with them, I tend to be stumped.

So, in the interim, while I attend to what Saint-Exupéry called “matters of great consequence”, I tried to come up with really deep or clever-as-McSweeney’s answers to these questions. But I arrived at no such thing. What I’ve come up with instead are the following, not profound and impressive but quick (although one might argue that a couple of months is hardly that) and honest (well maybe just a bit).

1. Holden Caulfield, angst and all. (I’d have gone with the entire cast of “fractious ~~and overpaid~~” characters-cum-narrators of Then We Came to the End, whose “mornings lacked promise”, but you specifically asked for only one fictional character. A list of very close runners-up of relatables includes the always anxious Jack Gladney in White Noise, the perpetually perplexed Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, and the rapacious Reader in If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler.)

2. My narrator’s voice, not unlike mine, will sound donnish and disoriented. And my life-book’s dust jacket will feature an anthropomorphic tortoise drawn in the nervous manner of Squigglevision or Quentin Blake, or else it will look almost exactly like the cover below, once the original author’s name and four-word resumé are removed while keeping the extremely appropriate title intact:

3. Sure. Lunch with Don DeLillo. Or for a more practical want, a house, which is something I’ve been longing to give my parents since time immemorial — a phrase which here means “almost a couple of decades ago” — and somewhere I could build from scratch, as it were, a library worthy of Jorge Luis Borges’s great metaphors.