Virgil

Antiquarian had a great set of personal literary preferences. I'm going to take her ten question format and answer it for my preferences.

1. One book that changed your life: Like Antiquarian, I can't say that any one book changed my life. Lots of books have expanded my thinking, openned my vision. Certainly Shakespeare. Hamlet, King Lear, McBeth, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra. The Gospels, Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, DH Lawrence's The Rainbow, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. And of course, Dante's The Divine Comedy.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once: Lots. If a book means something to me I've read it at least twice. So there many. Let me plug Joyce's Ulysses here, because it takes at least two readings to begin to get it. And one book that means a lot to me because I can near damn understand the heart of this mysterious lead character is Conrad's Lord Jim. God I love him as a character. And let's plug Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island: I have to have Cervantes' Don Quixote. It will brighten my life and bring a smile to my face. Oh and I would have to have The Complete Short Stories of DH Lawrence. The best short story writer ever, in my opinion.

4. One book that made you laugh:Besides Don Quixote, a hysterical novel is Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. Also check out David Lodge's Nice Work and Italo Calvino's The Baron In The Trees.

5. One book that made you cry: Books about dogs get me every time too. I don't usually cry from books, but Rudyard Kipling's Kim brought real tears to my eyes.

6. One book that you wish you had written:Lots and lots. William Faulkner's Light In August, Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, Lawrence's Women In Love, Virgil's The Aeneid, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Homer's The Illiad, Eugene O'Neil's A Long Day's Journey Into Night.

7. One book that you wish had never been written: Mien Kampf

8. One book you’re currently reading: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read: There are many, so many. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. I've never read The Old Testament all the way through. Add The Koran and Augustine's Confessions to that list. As to other novels, Stendhal's The Red and The Black, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, and Primo Levi's If Not Now, When?, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain.

10. One book you recommend to almost everyone: Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Dickens's Great Expectations, Tolstoy's The Death Of ivan Ilych, Doestoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov, Homer's The Odyssey, James Joyce's Dubliners, Hemingways Complete Short Stories, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

I've included some plays in there. But no poetry. We'll have to do this for just for poetry one day.