Not many RMHs out there - still thinking, are you? Do add one if it crosses your mind - or go out and find one, if you don't have it yet.
I'm afraid I'm entering the world of Book Memes. A 'meme', for those who don't know, is something akin to a chain letter on the internet, though less obtrusive, as I've gone and sought it out myself. 10 questions, relating to books, which you can feel free to respond to yourself.
1.
One book that changed your lifeThe obvious answer is the Bible. But that is 66 books, and I'm going to go beyond the obvious on this one. I think I'm going to say
The Enchanted Places by Christopher Milne. Perhaps an odd choice, but it is this book that catapaulted my reading into a new sphere. Having read it, I sought out AA Milne's
autobiography, and other works, which in turn led to EM Delafield, Richmal Crompton and Stephen Leacock... which went to Persephone... and the rest is history.
2. One book you've read more than onceHmm. I don't do this much (so many books out there! So little time!) The ones I've re-read include
Diary of a Provincial Lady, It's Too Late Now, Miss Hargreaves... all of which have appeared in my '50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About'. So I'm going to go for
Diary of a Nobody, as it's the only Victorian novel I've read more than once. Oh, wait, I may have read
The Picture of Dorian Gray twice... well, take your pick from the above. The only novels I've read three times are
Miss Hargreaves and
The Provincial Lady Goes Further.
3. One book you'd want on a desert island
Bible again, but I suppose that's a given? Other than the ones mentioned (
Provincial Lady would never stop me laughing) I think I'll go for Virginia Woolf's
The Waves, because there is so much IN there; I'd never run out of finding news things. Or
Pride and Prejudice.
4. One book that made you cryIt takes almost nothing for a book to make me cry. Oddly enough, the one guaranteed to make me blub is
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It is that one where we eventually meet Neville's parents, isn't it?
I wonder what Virginia would say about being mentioned so close to Harry.
5. One book that made you laughAnything by P. G. Wodehouse can make me laugh out loud.
Sam the Sudden is the most recent I read, possibly. Reminds me, I must make sure I get some back to Jacq before long... after finals, I'll have a Wodehousefest.
6. One book you wish had been writtenMiss Hargreaves Returns. There simply isn't enough of her. I know it's quite common to wish Emily Bront
ë had written something else, or Jane Austen had scribbled a few more novels, but I think it's quite nice to have a limited amount - think of someone like Wodehouse. If he'd written six books, they'd have been classics. As it is, with over ninety, most people can't name any of them.
7. One book you wish you had writtenGosh. So many. I'm going to try not to mention authors or books mentioned already, because I'd put a tick by almost all of them.
Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge, I think (a Persephone book) as it's the perfect example of domestic fiction.
8. One book you wish had never been written
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Ulysses, The Lord of the Rings. The first because it's so very wildly overrated, and bored me on my A Level syllabus (not to mention getting me my only B); the second because the IDEA was so good, and the execution so self-important and tedious, but means no-one can now attempt the same grand work and be original; the third because then people studying Science subjects might have read something else, and the cinema might
show something else.
9. One book you are currently readingOne Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens. You may remember it from my 'what shall I read next?' post. Well, I caved and started this - so very, very funny. Quite the antidote to revision.
10. One book you’ve been meaning to readOh, all of them. Well, that's not true. Other than the ones in my 'what shall I read next?' post, I definitely want to read
To Kill A Mockingbird and
Middlemarch and
Great Expectations and
The Innocents Abroad and
Barchester Towers and....