One book that changed your life – During a visit to the American Southwest in 1994, I contemplated geology as a path of study and career and serendipitously read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Page 6 contained the crux of my philosophy, my science-spirituality combo, my own Vedanta, in a way I could never put to words. Such a clear perception of what it means to live cinched my decision.
“… Like a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.”
One book you have read more than once – Re-reading books is a welcome distraction. While dusting or re-organizing a bookshelf, I find an old favorite and read passages from it, the can of Pledge and feather duster forgotten by my side. Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age: A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is one that always offers more with every experience, enhanced by travels and discoveries between each subsequent reading.
One book you would want on a desert island – This one’s difficult. May I cheat slightly and suggest The Collected Works of Mark Twain?
One book that made you cry – Not unlike brimful (on whose blog I discovered this meme), I bawled through parts of The Kite Runner and Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, the story of a young Hmong epileptic in America.
One book that made you laugh – Without Feathers by Woody Allen. Always.
One book you wish you had written – Microtectonics by Cees Paschier and Rudolf Trouw. If you’re a structural geologist and don’t enjoy this book, you ought to get your head examined. As my own Amazon review of the tome states, “To understand structural geology is to understand strain and deformation, especially at a microscopic level. This book expands upon elementary concepts in kinematics and material science to explain effortlessly the formation of fabric during deformation.”
Barring geo-geekery, Stephen Brust’s To Reign In Hell. Brust is a class act and can take on any culture’s mythology any day.
One book you wish had never been written – Again, I agree with brimful on The Da Vinci Code, so as to have avoided wanting to shred the book at any given opportunity, and making poor D endure several whittling editorial comments like, “Oh my god, he didn’t just insult my intelligence for the seventh time in ten pages” and “Dear Robert Langdork, please allow me to solve yet another puerile cipher for you.” Ugh, what regurgitated trash.
One book you are currently reading – Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
One book you have been meaning to read – A concurrent read of Janna Levin’s How The Universe Got Its Spots with Einstein’s Relativity. All of Jasper Fforde’s books got in the way and don’t require a pencil, paper and calculator along with said books.
Everyone’s tagged – you’re all it. Go forth and multiply, young meme!
Oh man! I somehow thought you’d already been tagged, or you would have been at the top of my list, my book-devouring diva!
Your reactions to The Da Vinci Code confirm my resolve to avoid that book like the plague.
Even though I had not mentioned it, I found The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down to be a really thought-provoking, heartrending book as well.
And the reason I love this meme is that it is so interesting to see the responses, and to get such excellent book recommendations (like the Edward Abbey book, which I’ll have to check out).