Book Meme

[apolla]

As requested by angiej, although where she gets anything related to 'grown up' and me, I don't know!

1)Total number of books I've owned?

In my whole lifetime? Must be in the hundreds. When I was a little girl, I had the whole set of Ladybird story books, and used to read them late at night when I couldn't sleep (yes, I had the insomnia thing back then, too!), then all the Famous Five and other Enid Blyton travesties. I must have owned upwards of 50 books about the Beatles at one point, a similar number of books on the Titanic. And God forbid I mention the dirty little Sweet Valley secret I think still lurks up in the attic somewhere. I guess as a girl I liked books that were easy enough for me to foist my own opinions and readings on, to actually make them better in my mind than they actually were. That, or I just like some trash sometimes.

Then there's my rock books, my movie books, the remainder of my university books... no idea how many, but my mother insists on making me get rid of some every so often. I resist, usually offering up a token sacrifice of books I really don't read.

Then there's the piles of books from The Folio Society, of which my dad is a member. We actually got the ENTIRE Arabian Nights for FREE with our most recent purchase, which is actually one hundred and fifty quid's worth of books. They're fabulous books, beautifully presented, although the gold decoration on my Alexander The Great by Robin Lane Fox is still coming off and leaving gold everywhere.

2) The last book I bought?

I actually have no idea. I've been thinking abou this and I just don't know. I can't remember. I don't know if it's that I haven't bought any books in ages or what. I want to say 'Phil Lynott: The Rocker' but I know it's not that because I bought that a few years ago. A book I actually bought would probably be The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (no prizes for guessing why)... but we got another bunch of books from the Folio dudes recently which included The Arabian Nights (SIX books!) and The Devil's Dictionary and something I wanted that I now can't remember... The Wit of Oscar Wilde, I think. I haven't had the time to really read any of them lately.

3) The last book I read?

Well, the only time I have to read lately seems to be while waiting for The Sims 2 to load, and I read some of the Arabian Nights, which so far seems to involve a lot of magicking naughty people into animals, which is OK. But I'm currently re-reading McNae's Essential Law for Journalists for my exam resit tomorrow. I say re-reading, I mean twonking about on the internet instead.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me: (in no particular order)

a. Lennon by Ray Coleman. I haven't read this book in literally years and years but it was 'that' book for me, and I guess marked the moment where I started reading biographies and non-fiction along those lines instead of fictional stuff. It was the moment when I realised that John Lennon was at once my hero and practically me. It managed to be honest and critical without being trashy and vicious like Albert Goldman, and it was the moment I discovered that John was a human being with strengths and weaknesses, not a saint or a demon. See also: No One Here Gets Out Alive/The Lizard King about Jim Morrison and Phil Lynott: The Rocker.

b. The Lords/The New Creatures by James Douglas Morrison. I actually just bought this a second time without realising, because I've never read it much- Jimmy's poetry is nothing if not veering on pretentious/inaccessible, but it's a perfect reflection of how he wanted to be viewed by the outside world and there are moments of sheer fucking genius as far as I'm concerned:

Like this: The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live  for us and whom we punish. If all the radios and televisions were deprived of their sources of power, all books and paintings burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed, all the arts of vicarious existence...
So basically, Jim Morrison saw the advent of reality TV coming thirty years before it happened. As for the 'heroes who live for us and whom we punish', I guess nobody would understand that better than His Shamanic Lizardness.

The Lords/The New Creatures isn't something I could ever read all in one go, isn't something I could read every day, but I require it in my life. And it also reminds me that it and The Moon's A Balloon by David Niven are the two last books I personally bought.

c. The Selected Works Of WB Yeats. Considering I'm not a big poetry person, there are two poetry books in this list. I discovered Yeats when I was doing A-Level English. My teacher was more obsessed with her Irishness than I am with mine, and she inflicted the great Irish writers upon us, not entirely successfully. I couldn't abide The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, and considering I never got more than a few pages into Dubliners or Ulysses, I figure I'm not a Joyce chick. But William Butler had me pretty much from the off. The Irish have a milennia-old tradition of bards and troubadours and storytellers, and he's one of the most recent greatest. Along with Philip Lynott (the last great Irish bard of the 20th century, by the way), WB helped me make contact and understand the half of me that I'll never truly be able to embrace because I've grown up in a kind of exile away from the mother country.

And now, it will also always remind me of a wet Dublin morning I spent in the Irish Writers Museum with angiej, trying to fit in as much of my inane Irish writer trivia as I could before the audioguide moved onto the next guy.

Most of all, WB's work always reminds me of myself- a sort of cynical view of love and beauty that still manages to retain some sort of hope:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

d. Am running out, not of ideas for the list, but of the ones I can remember. I'm not good at pulling lists like this together at random. I think I might at this point hark back many, many years to The Discovery Of The Titanic by Robert Ballard. I mean, this is years ago, back when I was learning to read real books instead of Spot the Dog or Jack and Jane. This is back when I was about 8, when the Titanic movie was a merciful decade away. I don't know why my dad bought the book, or how I came across it in a cupboard. I do know that it was side by side with a book by the same man about the Bismarck (German warship, sunk by the British/scuttled by its crew during the battle for Atlantic supremacy). I do know that I own both still, but one is massively dogeared and shows signs of having been handled by a careless little girl and the other is in almost perfect condition. I do know that I pored over this book, despite showing no other signs of interest in ships or shipwrecks. I do know that I revisited the book again and again over the following years until my godfather gave me another Titanic book and really kicked the whole thing into gear. But this book, this beautiful book told me everything I needed to know about the great triumph of shipbuilding, the overwhelming arrogance of owners/captains/press/etc and the undying tragedy that resulted from the combination of the two. It also later gave me great appreciation for what the modern-day crew had to achieve just to find the damn thing, let alone take pictures of it. See, the thing about Ballard is less that he found the ship, but more that he's taken pictures of it instead of pillaging it (unlike some). That beautiful, beautiful wreck is slowly/not-so-slowly rusting away at the bottom of the Atlantic, and I think it will probably be nothing more than an iron deposit within my lifetime, and we owe it to 2,200 people to document it as it once was, as it is now and to never, ever forget it.

Somehow, that one book taught me, a very long time ago, that nobody 'survived' the Titanic. It's just that some people didn't die. And the image on the front cover of the rusted but somehow proud bow of the most beautiful ship ever sent to the depths of the ocean will forever remain with me, seared into my mind after years of staring at it, unable to comprehend it completely and unwilling not to.

e. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. So, I considered the audience of this particular post and realised that this might be an obvious choice for the list. I got to Harry via the first movie on DVD. I thought the child acting risible, the effects lame but the story enchanting. I bought the first book and read it in 45 minutes. I bought the second book and took a whole hour. For the third, I read it again and again and again. I adored everything about it, and later realised the depth of its brilliance reading that essay on the Lexicon. PoA seems to me to be the most grown-up HP book in terms of how it was written. It was with PoA that I fell a little in love with Sirius Black and the man he should've become and it was with PoA that I really started to care about the characters JKR wrote for us. Without PoA, I probably would've forgotten about Harry Potter after awhile. I wouldn't have been suitably inspired to write fanfic, and that's the fandom ballgame. Of course, without PoA I might be revising for my exam tomorrow instead of writing an over-long meme.

It's at this point that I've been writing for over an hour and I'm sure I've missed out some incredibly life-changing book or two that I'll remember later and want to garrotte myself over. Speaking of garrotting, the Godfather is somewhere further down that list.

 

This is not a chain letter. If you break the chain, you will NOT have bad luck. If you don't break the chain, nobody will send you lots of money, ladies' underwear or tuna recipes. Given this caveat, I gently nudge the following 5 people:

ladycadey, annearchy, logansrogue,emony, and no_remorse: