Sum up your personality with 5 books!

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Jane Eyre
Ulysses
Doctor Zhivago
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4

...not exactly sure, but here it is

Very dark and twisted;)

She's Come Undone
Crimes of the Heart
Go Ask Alice
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
& any book by Murakami

But I WISH I could say the Harry Potter series :)
and Stargirl

(hm, I'll probably change my mind tomorrow...)

Does this adequately represent both my nerdiness and failure to be cool?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hee hee, nice catch! Hey everybody: CATFIGHT!!!!

I say, it's much more civilised here than ILE.

Notes from Underground
Moviegoer
Seize the Day
Junkie
The Little Prince

I'm not talking "this Thomas Friedman book gave me a more nuanced outlook on globalization" but like here's me:

-Because of various novelizations of X-Files episodes I distrust everything any government agency does, and there's a little Fox Mulder in my head who yammers conspiracy theories about world events on a regular basis. I manage to shut him up before I say anything stupid.

-I read Neuromancer in 7th grade and maintain an abiding interest in computer programming even though I've never written a line of code and have no idea how to do it (read goofy true crime books on catching hackers etc).

-Because of "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" at age 7, I want tomato soup on cloudy days.

What you got?

oh now that's interesting

Didn't realize the "Try this other thread" post on this thread button would post my text w/o letting me read the thread first.

I was sure I'd already posted to this, but apparently not. anyhow:

1) Kitchen Confidential: Anthony Bourdain
2) Collected Poems: Tom Raworth
3) Tlooth: Harry Mathews
4) French Provincial Cookery: Elizabeth David
5) Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem: Peter Ackroyd

I'm not entirely sure what this says about my personality, but there you go.

OK, trying to choose formative stuff, rather than my favourite books.

1) Myth of Sisyphus - Camus (tried to read it again recently and tired of it almost immediately, but it was formative - my personality is almost a description of one long effort to recover from the ravages of harsh sunlit French existentialism)

2) Ghost Stories of MR James (been readin these consistently since I was about 12. Have bought and lost more copies of this than any other book. A conviction that these stories represent perfection goes a good way towards explaining my hatred of literature snobs).

3) History of Europe by HAL Fisher (hey, I LIKE its Western European centred narrative drive, unlike Norman Davies, who is very dismissive of it. He has a certain flair and is given to authorative sounding sentences like 'The form of government under which the Romans conquered Italy and weathered the storms of the Punic Wars was, like many constitutions which are the growth of time, one thing in theory and another in practice'. Nowadays the tenor of history may have changed, no doubt for the better, but the way he makes sense of his material is brilliant. As his sense of proportion, something modern factual writers seems almost entirely to lack)

4) Tale of a Tub - Swift. (astonishing - the stylistic masterpiece of a youth surging with genius. Imperious, cunning as hell, anarchically proliferating and, like totally profound, o frenz Augustan. No matter the subject in hand and even his intentions, Swift's writings savour pungently of a spirit that is anti-authoritarian. My pole star.)

5) The Man Who Was Thursday - GK Chesterton (thought long and hard about this, it being the last choice. Felt I should put a woman, or someone a bit more modern or American, or even, for Christ's sake some poetry, just to make things look a bit more balanced, but might as well be honest. Yes the end's a load of bosh, at best bizarre, at worst embarrassingly silly, but ye gods man, the chase! the chase! The sense of magic and adventure is unmatched by any other adult literature I have read - and that seduction will always, no matter how much more abstract matters may at time command the attention, will always, I say, seduce me from any other course. It is callow maybe, but unfortunately that reflects perfectly my character.)

Don Quixote
Revolutionary Road
The Library of Babel
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Watership Down

Can't tell if these books shape who I am, or if I like these books because of how I'm shaped (pear-like, unfortunately).

Mansfield Park
Middlemarch
Lolita
Paradise Lost
King Lear

Mansfield Park
Middlemarch
Lolita
Paradise Lost
King Lear

― rjberry, Monday, 29 September 2008 20:11 (43 minutes ago) Bookmark

Great books. Scary personality.

1. There's A Boy In the Girl's Bathroom by Louis Sachar, about a lonely little kid who is too weird to go on and deliberately alienates everyone, makes friends with a school counselor who gets fired and moves away, kid is sad.

2. OZ books by L. Frank Baum, which have been more influential on my writing and humor than anything else, and are also super imaginative and fucking crazy.

3. Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut - "Loneliness is the human condition." Also the book is bonkers and sadly undervalued even by its author.

4. Momo by Michael Ende - little odd book about letting people (literally) steal your time by the author of The Neverending Story. Nostalgic and otherworldly.

5. Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer - made me realize actually science is probably the thing I love most in the world. Parasites are the future. (past & present too)

Momo is like a novel of Magritte paintings.

The Bostonians
Lincoln
The Prague Orgy
Wallace Stevens - Collected Poems
Women in Love

Sterne - Tristram Shandy
Zukofsky - An "Objectivists" Anthology
Deleuze/Guattari - Nomadology
Sade - 120 Days Of Sodom
Jerome - Three Men In A Boat

lol ok you can take out "120 Days of Sodom" and replace it with Wisden :D

I can sum up a good portion of my personality with one book, the book I wrote at the end of 2004:

• Escape on Foot: A Tale of Fugitive Pleasure.*

For vigorish, I'll toss in:

• The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
• Roughing It, Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens)
• Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell (aka Eric Blair)
• Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Not in any order.

Novalis - The Novices of Sais
Antonin Artaud - Heliogabalus: The Crowned Anarchist
Edward Dahlberg - The Carnal Myth
Lucius Apuleius - The Golden Ass
Charles Baudelaire - Paris Spleen

Christopher Brookmyre - One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night
Some excellent Scottish crime writing - "Like Die Hard wi a kilt oan". Brookmyre has some fantastic views on life, religion, business. Amazing.

Thomas Hardy - The Mayor of Casterbridge
Melancholy and fatalistic, but with brilliantly written passages dealing with the countryside, the gods, love, work...

Douglas Coupland - Hey! Nostradamus
Some Canadian writing - similar, to my mind, to 'The Lovely Bones'. About a high-school girl, just pregnant, gunned down in a school cafeteria. Narrated in 4 parts.

Granta 76: Music
Or any other book dealing with music. As a music teacher etc etc etc...

Albert Camus - l'Étranger
And lastly, my addiction to France and all things French. If I hadn't done music, I'd be finishing my last year doing French at uni at the moment.

A Handful of Dust - Waugh
Gulliver's Travels- Swift
Labyrinths - Borges
Reflections- Chamfort
The English Auden

blimey, great thread, tough concept

do i delineate parts of my personality which i like or wish to highlight only?
am i honest enough to put LOTR in there?

omg Abbott, there was this inexplicable copy of Momo on my bookshelf right at eye level for most of my childhood! I remember taking it down once, looking at the rather creepy cover, and reading the blurb on the back, which I couldn't really make heads or tails of. I must've been pretty young. I don't think I ever read it. it seemed... wrong, somehow. like some sort of evil cursed book.

A Handful of Dust - Waugh
Gulliver's Travels- Swift
Labyrinths - Borges
Reflections- Chamfort
The English Auden

― woofwoofwoof, Tuesday, 30 September 2008 11:01 (9 hours ago) Bookmark

A Handful of Dust rather than Decline and Fall: how vicious.

Everything else: okay.

What can I say GR? There's a gloomy streak to me: it all ends in a perpetual hell of reading Dickens to a madman after being cuckolded by a fool, rather than settling back in to where you started after growing a big beard.
But: there is a base world of sanity, hence GT not, pace you, ToaT (miracle though that work is)

I looked with astonishment at my post there, as I don't remember writing it - what did I mean 'okay'? I really have no idea. Maybe it was just before I was sick in a shoebox.

do i delineate parts of my personality which i like or wish to highlight only?
am i honest enough to put LOTR in there?
― The Atlantis Mystery Solved! (Frogman Henry), Tuesday, 30 September 2008 11:14 (Yesterday)

This has made me realise that I should have put The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe down. Apparently I used to come down each morning as one of the characters in it, Edmund or Peter, but also Susan and Lucy (eh?) and wouldn't respond unless addressed as one of the characters. Brings a whole new meaning to the term fairy stories. I read these all again recently (there was nothing else, honest) and a couple of things struck me quite forcibly.

1) They're well written, but because of that, they feel . I suppose it's partly the Christianity/strange creation myth stuff, but, well, WHY did he write these? I can understand the why of his Out of the Silent Planet science fiction stuff because it's directed at adults.(even though they're cuckoo, but in an appealing way, apart from the last volume which is just straight out berserk, talking bears and cosmic war etc). Clearly he felt they were worth writing, but I want to go up to him and say 'What's the gyme eh, me old mucker? Wot you playing at?'

2) The Magician's Nephew is a massive rip off of The Story of the Amulet by E Nesbitt.

3) The Last Battle is wop.

However I let him off, a bit, because of the anecdote that has him at a meeting of the Inklings, with Tolkein reading out extracts from LotR. 'Even the mild-mannered CS Lewis,' so it runs, 'was heard at one stage to mutter, "Not another fucking elf."

Herk herm, got carried away with the Inklings anecdote. Should read -

1) They're well written, but partly because of that, they feel rather sinister.

Oh god this is too hard.

Let's see, Watership Down, definitely, identifying more with the various quiet, helpful in their own way rabbits, rather than Bigwig.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

There's this old out-of-print children's book called Merlin's Magic that's one of my favorite things ever. There are certain moments that I read so often they become perfection in my mind - a boy walking into a pub and leaving through a moss-covered back door, as people shout "Stop him! No one goes through there!" and walking out into the China of Kublai Khan. The same kid being chased through Alph the Sacred River, which shimmers and disappears, along with the enemy, once he reaches the sunless sea.

Cruddy, by Lynda Barry.

The Circus of Dr. Lao, by Charles G. Finney

If I left out children's books, hmm, maybe The Good Soldier (though I hope I'm not quite as clueless as the narrator), The Plague, maybe? Need to reread it. Pogo probably had more influence on my personality than any of these though. Porkypine is one of my role models.

dude, stop saying maybe.

This is hard...

1. Lucky Jim: Kingsley Amis (identify strongly with central character)
2. Finn Family Moomintroll: Tove Jansson (I suspect the general philosophy of these books informed my worldview)
3. Day of the Triffids: John Wyndham (launched life-long, somewhat pathological, obsession with end of the world/mass disaster)
4. The Bookshop: Penelope Fitzgerald (obvious)
5. Oblomov: Ivan Goncharov (I'm a lazy bastard)

oblomov is me and everyone I know

Cruddy, by Lynda Barry.

Oh clotpoll, me too...which lord knows what THAT says.

1. Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon
2. Liars in Love, Yates
3. The Modern Prince, Gramsci
4. Intergalactic Superspy (the series), McEvoy
5. Cities in Flight, Blish

btw, there is a thread for discussion of life-altering books: This book changed my life

It died all too young, but if we all just believe in fairies and clap our hands, maybe...

Notes from Underground
The Castle
Lipstick Traces
Book of Revelation
Dune

franny & zooey
stone butch blues
the phantom tollbooth
gilead
the twits

because i am goofy and not really that complex

Four Fur Feet, Brown
The Giving Tree, Silverstein
The Noontide Demon, Solomon
The Book of Evidence, Banville
Miss McIntosh, My Darling, Young

'The Book of Evidence' - yikes! Who did you kill?

I'd be more worried about The Giving Tree.

I'm not especially murderous and I've never been to Ireland, but we have some non-lethal interests in common as well as a thinly-disguised university.

These days, Joachim Spitzer, c'est moi.

'Personality' is tricky. I'm not sure how to do that, rather than name books I love or that connect with my perceptions and interests.

Martin Amis, Money - cos the book's style helped my understanding of style, and in a way its NYC refracted my NYC; cos I like eating and drinking a lot too; cos I can understand the appeal of cheeky inapt jokes and deadpan; cos I like calling chicks 'chicks'

Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems - or any other collection really - I guess cos he's lazy and casual (though energetic and brilliant) and likes to have fun, oh, and is funny too

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes for the same reasons as O'Hara really

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar cos life can be hard as well (never mind that the book's also beautiful and hilarious)

James Joyce, Ulysses - cos it has presumably shaped whatever my personality might be, more than any other book I have read since I turned 18; and I must have spent longer reading this than anything. And cos my sense of style, language, culture, urban life, ordinary passing time in the streets, is all bound up with this book.

I fear that the above is just a list of my favourite books. Maybe someone else could perform this exercise more precisely for me.

The Journalist (Mathews)
Confessions (Rousseau)
The Untouchable (Banville)
Mezzanine (Baker)
Falconer (Cheever)

Mmmnh; these are the first five that come to mind; I just gone for favourites; no summing up desired.

1. Edward Tufte - The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
2. Richard Feynman - QED

(what I aspire to at work)

3. Some Jeeves and Wooster book

(hahahaha)

4. Those Edmund Wilson biographies of Teddy Roosevelt

(I have no idea how they are thought of, but I guess the fact that I loved reading them says something about my personality)

5. Sydney: 30 Days in the City by Peter Carey

(loopy semi-fiction, has anyone read this?)

caek, your #1 (Tufte) is uber-classic in its highly specialized niche. What led you to it?

I'm doing a doctorate where I plot graphs all day long!

graphspergers - the graphs and quantitative visualization thread

You are drinking at the very font then, you wise soul.

day of the locust
the girl with the silver eyes
pale fire
the professor of desire
kingsley amis on drink

4. Those Edmund Wilson biographies of Teddy Roosevelt

(I have no idea how they are thought of, but I guess the fact that I loved reading them says something about my personality)

Edmund Morris, you mean?

y