peckish for books

boo! i hab a code (and so does the paloma...) *sniffle, hack, wheeze*

yay! daddy in a strange land just tagged me with a bookish meme (keeb n myde, i'm udder de infooence uf daykil) :

1.Hardcover or paperback, and why?
i love the idea of hardcover books. but there's something endearing about beat up, well loved, dogeared books to me.

2.If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
big fish books. i have a thing for fish... and second chances... and epic, magical, mythological stories of romance, tragedy, triumph, and redemption...

3.My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…
i just picked a book off the shelf (yasunari kawabata's palm of the hand stories) and my favorite quote from the book is from the story "the grasshopper and the bell cricket"

"Even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket. And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper. Should that day come, when it seems to you that the world is only full of grasshoppers, I will think it a pity that you have no way to remember tonight's play of light when your name was written in green by your beautiful lantern on a girl's breast."

4.The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be…
i've already been lucky enough to spend three weeks with jessica hagedorn. but for a lunch, i would say david sedaris 'cause i can't imagine he likes to spend more than half an hour w/ people he doesn't know and he must have some peculiar eating habits and i'd get to go to france for a day. i would LOVE to have a playdate with jk rowling, visit graceland with douglas adams' ghost, build sandcastles with anne rice or pick apples with stephen king.


5.If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except for the SAS survival guide, it would be…
annie dillard's pilgrim at tinker creek. no contest.


6.I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…
would physically transport me into a story/book to observe everything as if i was there - eating, dancing, fighting, riding trains, shopping at markets with characters.


7.The smell of an old book reminds me of…
my first drafty garden apartment where i often read on a thread bare, thrift store, damask couch in the small patches of sun that came in thru the eastern windows in the morning. i realize now what a luxury it was to browse used bookstores, bring the loot home and read and read and read.


8.If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…
mark carwardine in last chance to see. (does that count?)

9.The most overestimated book of all time is…
i hate to admit this because i have NEVER met anyone else who had the same issue...

i could not get through "a heartbreaking work of staggering genius" which kills me because i REALLY want to read it especially with author dave eggers being chicagoan and the story being set in suburban lake forest, blah blah blah... i will probably never get thru this book.

the only other book that i could think of that was "overestimated" and i read - the davinci code

10. I hate it when a book…
doesn't get from point a to b successfully/logically (for me)... for example, the last harry potter was really disappointing (for me)....


so, heads up, chgo chick, bloggo chicago, flahute, uncle hambone and the thin man - TAG, YOU'RE IT.