I know, the One Book meme is sooooo last week, but here I go anyway…
– One book that changed your life. I’ve blogged about it a lot already, but I’m going to say Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus. Maybe to say it changed my life is a little melodramatic, but I can say that it changed my sense of the possibilities of the realist novel. No, it changed my sense of the possibilities of language. Yes, language. I kept pinching myself while reading it–not literally, but you get the idea.
– One book that you’ve read more than once. A friend recently told me that he’s reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time, and I realized that this is a condition I aspire to. In other words, I wanted for a second to claw his eyes out, but the second passed and I masked my jealous rage nicely, I thought. It used to be every Christmastime that I read P&P. Now my readings are further spaced out, every three or four years instead of every single one as I try (without hope) to regain a state of innocence vis-