Posts tagged ask

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. 

Hi! Just discovered your blog via planetickets and I think it's AWESOME. I love your choice of blog title(Nick Hornby fan here)! I named my highschool newspaper column the same thing. Looking around your recent posts, I can definitively say that you have excellent taste in books. :D — Asked by phantompunched

Why, good morning to you too, fellow Nick Horby fan. :)

I had the good fortune of spotting a slightly dog-eared but really cheap copy of the very rare (at least in this side of the planet) The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, the definitive anthology of Hornby’s essays and reviews in his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column in The Believer, which were previously published as three separate volumes, namely The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, and Shakespeare Wrote for Money, in one of the bargain bins of one of the bookstores that I frequent. And while I admit that Hornby’s articles are nowhere near as well-written or as important as, say, Martin Amis’s in his own collection, The War Against Cliché, I quote myself from nine months ago: “I’d have to be the dumbest person in the world not to buy it right then and there.”

Far more than being deeply insightful, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree was consistently fun to read, and I dare say those descriptions, former and latter both, are what I’d like the anthology’s namesake book blog, that is to say, this blog, to arrive at being someday.

P.S. I’ve also configured the URL http://www.thepolysyllabicspree.com to redirect to this blog, in case anyone’s interested in, you know, just knowing about it.

P.P.S. Everyone ought to follow Zet aka planetickets ‘cause she is awesome. And I’m not just saying that.

Hi Aldrin! :) Would you know where I can get a copy of that book? — Asked by toynbeeconvector

Hi, Nash! I presume you’re talking about Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. I learned of the book from Johnine, who had been looking for a copy of it and asked me if I happened to have chanced upon one. I wasn’t aware of the book prior to her asking me about it since I hardly ever browse the biography and memoirs sections (I’m not so crazy about nonfiction), but it wasn’t long before I found a copy at Fully Booked Gateway—and bought it. Hehe. Then I looked for more copies in other bookstores, and the cheapest I found was in NBS Robinsons Galleria. I immediately informed Johnine, and soon enough she went there and got hold of it. If I’m not mistaken, only one copy is left, and it may just be yours. :)