Meme: Five Questions About Books

What’s a book you most want to read again for the first time?:
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. Yes, this is my favorite book of all time. However, it was never recommended to me; I picked it up in hardcover off the shelf at Sam Weller's days before a trip to Kansas with my mother. I'm not sure that I even read the jacket or really understood what it was about. This would have been when I was a sophomore in high school. But what a delightful surprise! I can still vividly remember actually reading in the car (despite my tendency toward carsickness) and laughing out loud, trying to explain to my mom the intricacies of time-traveling historians, séance-rigging, cat-rescuing, and jumble sales. It made me feel as if there was finally an author who was writing a book just for me.

What was one of your favorite childhood books?:
For younger childhood, this would be The Monster at the End of this Book (starring lovable, furry old Grover). I can't tell you how many times I've enjoyed getting to the end and discovering (SPOILER ALERT) that the monster is really Grover. It still gets me every time, even now when I am reading it to someone else. As an older child, I really enjoyed the characters and the puzzle aspect of The Westing Game, which is the kind of book that wouldn't play well in the age of Google, but which a younger me found absolutely fascinating.

What’s a book that you were assigned in school that you were expecting to be bad, but that turned out to be really good?:
I vaguely remember enjoying Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, which I had to read early on in my high school career. I don't think I expected the humor. Mostly I experienced the reverse--I expected the books my teachers assigned to be good, and some of them turned out to be pretty bad.

What’s your “guilty pleasure” read?:
Like Amanda, the person from whom I am borrowing this meme, I don't really feel guilty about reading much, and I try to read pretty widely. However, there are certain really, really terrible lesbian romance novels that I wish I could get my wasted time back from. The kind that make you think "Hey, I could write something better than this," but then for some reason you keep reading, and the minute you finish you forget everything about the book except the giant number of typos.

What’s a book you feel you should read, but haven’t yet?:
This is a pretty long list. I could say Ulysses, but then I would be lying. At the moment I guess it would be The Catcher in the Rye, or anything else by J.D. Salinger.

Thanks to @amandamcneil for posting her version of this meme and inspiring me to do the same.