The Calvino Meme

I wish I could be like my friend Danny and resist a meme, but I just don’t seem to have that kind of willpower, or maybe it’s that I don’t have his kind of originality and have to depend on others to tell me what to write about on a regular basis (although Mandarine has been busy giving me tons of non-meme topics that I'll have to start addressing soon, so I can't really use that as an excuse). This meme was absolutely impossible for me to resist. Just before I came across it over at Litlove's place, I'd written about how The Thirteen Tales plays with readers in a way I hadn’t enjoyed since my last reading of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, one of my long-time favorite books. Lo and behold, around the time I was composing that statement, clever Kate was devising this meme based on the scene in the bookstore in Calvino’s book. So, here you have it: the meme I couldn't resist (as if there has ever been one I could). It also happens to be my first of 2007:

Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages
I once mentioned for some other meme I think that Le Miserables falls into this category (I've been meaning to read it ever since I first saw the Broadway play about fifteen years ago). The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is another one (obviously not nearly as long in this category, but getting there, since we own the advance reader's page proofs picked up at some book conference just before it was published). I often worry I might suffer some huge feeling of disappointment that has nothing to do with the books themselves, though, were one of these two actually to be moved from this category, their being so used to being neglected and my being so used to neglecting them. Maybe they should be moved to a new category like “books I’ve been planning to read for ages, but let's be real, and acknowledge there’s probably no bloody way in hell I’ll ever get around to doing so.” Then I could just admire them from afar, no feelings of guilt whatsover when I stop by to pet them occasionally, knowing they're no longer looking hopefully up at me trying to convince me they're well worth my spending time on them.

Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success
The Melendy Family by Elizabeth Enright, which is a bound volume of the first three books that involve Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver and all their adventures. I once found it on some used bookstore web site for $100, which I wasn’t desperate enough to pay at the time, although now it’s beginning to become something about which I think, “what’s a $100 for such a worthy cause?” since it’s just completely disappeared, as far as I can tell. Anyone have a copy they want to sell me?

Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment
Do sample maunscript pages for books about math that haven’t yet been published but will be in 2007 and 2008 count? If not, I've got a few books on multiple personality disorder I've checked out of the library and am referring to for a fiction piece I'm writing.

Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case
All the really basic cookbooks like The Joy of Cooking, as well as comfort books for bad days like I Capture the Castle and Three Men in a Boat.

Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer
Summer time is for re-reading Ross MacDonald, preferably out in a hammock up in Maine with a gin and tonic.

Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves
Any book published by Persephone Books. They look so nice all lined up together, and they are guaranteed, thus far, to be fabulous reads. I wish I owned the shop (actually, at this point, I wish I could just visit the shop, or that they'd open an American branch in New York).

Books That Fill You With A Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
Anything to do with the brain. Bob and I have been fighting over the double issue of The Economist, because it’s got many interesting articles on this topic.

Books Read Long Ago That It’s Now Time To Reread
I’d love to re-read The World According to Garp, which I read for the first and last time when I was fifteen, and for years, claimed it was my favorite book (it was the book that brought me firmly into the world of reading contemporary adult literature). I can’t imagine what my reaction to it might be today.

Books That If You Had More Than One Life You’d Certainly Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
Native Son, which would be a re-read. It had such a huge impact on me, and yet it was such an incredibly difficult read, I’m not sure I could handle it again, like watching A Clockwork Orange (one of my all-time favorite movies, but one I decided after the third viewing there was no need to ever subject myself to the pain of watching again).

Anyone who wants to keep this meme going on your own blog, I hope you will. Meanwhile, I've realized after having lunch with Dorr today and laughing about how I'm not a lit blogger (during the period when I wasn't busy spilling my cranberry juice and seltzer all over myself), I've gone and yet again, written about books. I also have an unprecedented, for me (I think), five links in this post. Slowly, but surely, I must be getting over my technophobia.