One book per answer.
Oh, I’m borrowing this from Sheila.
One book you’re currently reading: Winter’s Tales by Isak Dinesen.
One book that changed your life: Hm. I have honestly never met one other person who has ever read this book, it’s obscure, I guess, but The Rock and The Willow by Mildred Lee. I think it may even be out of print now. Much to my delight, in the middle of all our upheaval, I recently found my beaten-up paperback copy with my fat junior high writing sprawled on the inside cover, not once but twice, “Property of Tracey So-and-So.” It’s actually one of the first books I can remember owning for myself. It was mine. So that was part of it, I’m sure. This, this is mine. Beyond that, I related to Enie Singleton. She was shy and unpopular and good at school. Just like me. Okay. So her family was huge and she lived in Alabama and it was the middle of The Great Depression, so those particulars didn’t match mine, but I related to the imposed narrowness of her life. Enie longed for things that don’t seem possible or that she wasn’t supposed to long for. She wanted to travel, to write, to see and to be part of the larger world. Oh, and when one CD (Seedy) Culpepper showed up in town with his whiff of danger and mystery and became a hired hand on their farm and fell in love with his “little red-headed Enie”? Uhm, I was gone. I was 13 and Seedy Culpepper thrilled me and scared me and I wanted him SO BAD. I was breathless to find out how “little red-headed Enie” would handle her life. That entire book showed me, living in my narrow dictated life, that it was okay to long for things, that longings meant something, that I wasn’t alone in my yearning. Whenever I felt alone in my home with the kinds of thoughts I kept to myself, I would always remember Enie Singleton. She validated me.
One book you’d want on a deserted island: Oh dear. Oh dear. How about The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis? Uhm, one that includes Narnia? Which doesn’t exist to the best of my knowledge.
One book you’ve read more than once: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Yep. I’m a cliche.
One book you’ve never been able to finish: I have not yet finished One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I was becoming shrunken and demoralized from all the characters with, hello, the same damn name. And last week, when the movers were moving our bed, I found my copy of the book on the floor smack dab under where my head would lie, with the back cover and the author’s photo facing up and I realized that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s chocolate pastille eyes had been boring into my head for lo! these many months. Well now. No wonder I couldn’t sleep.
One book that made you laugh: Well, Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray made me laugh out loud at times. When I was reading the book a couple of years ago, I was carrying it everywhere, even to church. I was in “the band” and sang at both services so my day at church was very long. In the half-hour break between services, while other people were socializing and eating donuts, I was crouched on the stairs at the back of the stage, reading Vanity Fair. At one point, my girlfriend K found me back there, looked at me for a second, then put her hands on her hips and scolded, “Tracey! How can you be reading that book! And at church!” I just stared at her, totally bewildered, then said, “Uhm, well …. it’s a classic. A 19th century classic.” A pause. A huge pause, actually, and then she was full of remorse. “Oh, Tracey, I’m sorry. I went to San Diego State, you know.” Hahahahaha. The San Diego State Defense. And we both immediately knew what she meant. When I asked her what she thought the book was, she didn’t have an answer. Maybe the word vanity messed with her head? Like how could I be reading a book about vanity AT CHURCH?? Hahaha. I don’t know. What a naughty girl.
One book that made you cry: The Old Man and The Sea by Hemingway. Which I reread a couple of years ago. Something in that book, a particular moment that I won’t go into here, completely broke me down at 2 in the morning. I sobbed my eyes out because of this one distinct moment and how I related to it. To an old man and the sea. It seems absurd in a way, but that’s how it was. Amazing how you can go back to a book years later and see something totally different, isn’t it?
One book you keep rereading: Oh, anything by my Christian author boyfriend Disco Stu. Blahdie blahdie blah already.
One book you’ve been meaning to read: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Will I ever do it? I don’t know. Now it seems like my shame over never reading it outweighs my desire to read it. It has crippled me.
One book you believe everyone should read: Well, I’m with Sheila on this one: “Everyone”? Just how much of a tyrant do I want to be? To play along, though, how about Les Miserables by Victor Hugo? Don’t just go see the musical and say you know it. You don’t. (Wow. I really am a tyrant. Boooooo.) Okay. Slighly modulating my tyranny here: I think anyone would feel richer for having read this book.
Grab the nearest book. Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence…
“These are terrible words to the ear of a Legitimist,” she cried.
One book you’re currently reading: Actually in between books right now. Just finished one last night (kids book I previewed for my daughter) called What the Dickens by Gregory Maguire (same guy who wrote Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister).
One book that changed your life: The Shack by William P. Young. It’s a hard read early on, but the view of our relationship with God and with Christ is awesome.
One book you’d want on a deserted island: My Bible. Cliche, but necessary, in my opinion.
One book you’ve read more than once: Anything by Terry Pratchet and Douglas Adams. Cannot stop laughing sometimes. Just jump at the ground and miss.
One book you’ve never been able to finish: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Doesn’t make sense that I can’t, I’ve just never been able to.
One book that made you laugh: The Philosophical Strangler by Eric Flint.
One book that made you cry: Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card. Not just cry, sob.
One book you keep rereading: The Narnia series. I have 4 kids and I keep re-reading it with them.
One book you’ve been meaning to read: Anything by Tolstoy. I’ve just not quite worked up to it, although I did finish Moby Dick last year and was surprised both at how boring sections of it are and how good other sections are. Melville needed a better editor.
One book you believe everyone should read: The Shack. It’s about the best story of how we should relate to Christ that I’ve ever seen, and a pretty good view of the concept of the Trinity as well.
Grab the nearest book. Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence: “Higher levels possess all of the capabilities of the lower levels.” Pretty philosophical type of statement but I’m at work and it comes from a computer systems book.
Patrick — Sorry, for some reason you went into moderation.
What do you think of Maguire’s books? I’m curious.
And I’ve just recently heard of this whole “Shack” phenomenon. (I do tend to shy away from most “Christian fiction” though.) My barometer on these things is this: If my family loved it, I will likely hate it and vice versa. It’s terrible to say, I guess, but our tastes are completely opposite, so I find it a useful tool. I haven’t heard them weigh in on this book yet. They all LOVED the Left Behind series, though, and I found it unbearable. Couldn’t finish it. WOULDN’T finish it.
Ah! The Fountainhead. Long ago, a boyfriend and I were obsessed with The Fountainhead. I think our entire relationship was ONLY about The Fountainhead. He got himself a kitten and named it Roark. Hahahaha. This is my cat, Howard Roark. He is an architect. We were pretentious losers. That book defines a very specific period of my life.
We were pretentious losers.
Tracey, I never get tired of you. You always make me laugh out loud.
It is my favorite thing in the world to see what other people are reading and what they love and what they hate, whatever. It’s like a drug!!
I am halfway thru War and Peace – and while I can no longer read fiction in this particular phase in my life – I will say that what I read so far was so good that you do feel like grabbing people on the street and screaming, “THIS IS WHY EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT THIS BOOK!!!!” Like … duh. Of course. But it was exhilarating. You will get sucked in. That’s the great thing about it – the chapters are short little things, you don’t get lost in some huge narrative – it’s episodic … I was loving it. I will get back to it.
And Vanity Fair is one i have not read – but boy you make me want to pick it up immediately!!
Well, maybe I CAN do it some day, War and Peace. Again, though, with the crippling shame. I LOVED Anna Karenina when I read it way back, you know, in the last century. But War and Peace seems like a completely different animal. Daunting.
And Vanity Fair? Seriously, my best reading experience of 2006. I loved it. Thackeray is FUNNY, razor sharp. And Becky Sharp? Well, you love her, you hate her, she is a singular dizzying creation. (Margaret Mitchell obviously drew on her for Scarlett O’Hara — she MUST have — but I think Becky is funnier, more ridiculous. She is delicious! I loved her!) I wasn’t really expecting the book to be so funny, so satirical — I mean, I went into it almost completely blind — so it was just a JOY to discover.
Oh, and I am desperate to find one other woman — or man! — who read The Rock and The Willow once upon a time.
Please someone! Anyone!
I am needy and seek validation at every turn.
Tracey – ooooh. Now I’m really excited.
One of my favorite authors – Lucy Maud Montgomery – considered Becky Sharp to be one of the greatest female creations in literature, and I am sure it was some of her inspiration for all of the great female characters she created. Infuriating, complex, human, funny women – all of them!!
I loved Anna K too (even though I had to suffer through the 300 long diatribe about the threshing practices in Odessa or whatever the heck was going on there). War and Peace is way BIGGER – it’s about the WORLD – although Anna K creates that world too. But, like, Napoleon is a character in War and Peace. The Czar is a character. It is an incredible glimpse into a world that is about to die and yet at the same time he gets into minute emotional experiences – of infidelity and first love and religious conversion – that just is so damn good you wonder that ANYONE has the courage to write anything!!
And please don’t flog me, but I haven’t read Les Miz. I have owned it since college. Never read it. It’s on that MUST READ BEFORE I SHUFFLE OFF THIS MORTAL COIL pile … but as I have learned recently, there is no time like the present, eh???
300 PAGE long diatribe, Sheila. 300 PAGE long diatribe.
Calm down.
I do not remember the 300-page long diatribe on threshing?? Did I repress that? Hm. Threshing does seem like a prime candidate for repression, though.
And I do think you would love Vanity Fair. I hope you would, anyway. There are moments from that book that I relive in my mind and still laugh at — without even having the words in front of me. (The movie, though — as much as I love Reese Witherspoon — was garbage.)
As far as Les Mis, I would never flog you for not reading it — or anything! You’ll get to it when it’s right for you.
Hopefully you did repress the long diatribe on how people farmed in Odessa in those days and what was going on with the hay bales, etc.
I was like, “Can we please go back to Moscow now?? To the romance and intrigue? Thank you!!”
I remember years ago in college my boyfriend was reading Les Miserables, and there were times when he’d be reading it and I’d be doing something else, cooking or cleaning or whatever – and suddenly he’d just put the book down and throw his head back … and I’d know to not ask, “What’s going on?” Because he just had to THINK and ABSORB the book and deal with the greatness of it all.
I have always always been curious about it – and I do love historical novels that incorporate world events – one of the reasons that War & Peace is so cool …
I need to gear up for it!
LOL. Not at your list. But at the last question. I’m currently *on* page 56 of my novel (the rewrite, anyway), and as soon as I saw “page 56,” I went, Hey! I’m writing that!
Anyway. Fifth sentence is… “That?”
sarahk — Hahahaha. “That?”
Okay. Now I really want that next installment. You cannot leave me hanging like THIS.
sheila — I know how he feels. Some books are just too huge — and I mean spiritually, emotionally, philosophically — to take in large chunks. You must go slowly, digest, absorb. Les Miserables is one of those books, just like I know War and Peace will be … when I get to it. It’s almost as if you have to train to be ready to take on these kinds of books. Get your heart strong; get your brain in gear; be ready to, you know, go the distance with the book, whatever that distance is.
1) Surprised by Hope, by N.T. Wright.
2) The Hammer of God, by Bo Giertz. What a beautiful story. It gave me a profound heart for people, just loving and caring for them. And while you know, the whole story, that it clearly lays out guidelines and boundaries for behavior, it does it in a way that inspires love and grace for those who fail, rather than anger. Plus, it’s just amazing.
3) Something long, I would think. Maybe War and Peace? I think you can either go two routes on this one – something to keep you occupied, or one of your favorites to keep you company. I think if I picked one of my all-time favorites, it would just make me miss home more, and then I would be miserable. Or perhaps I am overthinking this question. 🙂
4) Anne of Green Gables. When I first started this book, I hated it. My parents pretty much forced me to read it. But then I fell in love with it.
5) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Yes, I am a bad Christian. My godmother gave me an entire boxed set of the Chronicles of Narnia, when I was very little (at my baptism, maybe?). Anyway, I’ve had them since before I can remember. When I was 9 or 10 I started to dig into LWW and was a little freaked out by the fantasy aspect of it, and quit reading. The whole set sat on my bookshelf until a couple years ago when the movie came out, and I was feeling like I probably wasn’t a real Christian if I didn’t like this story. So I started in again, trying to read one chapter a night. By the third night, I was bored. I had absolutely zero motivation to pick the book up. I simply did not care what happened to the characters. So back on the shelf it goes. And off to hell I go.
6) Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. Every book cracks me up. I don’t know why. People are running around getting killed and trying to kill others, and Grandma over here is trying to pick up men at funerals while Lula can’t go on a stakeout without chicken fingers or donuts.
7) With God in Russia, by Walter Ciszek. Heck, I didn’t even make it through the introduction. I work at Starbucks (sorry, Tracey!), and I brought along this nice book I had gotten at a used bookstore to read during my break. The next thing I know, I was sitting the back room weeping, on like the second page.
8) Cliche, but the Bible. I’m in seminary, and the professors tend to sort of expect that.
9) Emma. Yeah, I haven’t read many of the classics. I finally got around to Pride and Predjudice about 2 years ago.
10) Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It is simply fabulous. It gives you a whole new perspective on how awesome rotten weather is.
11) This had been his thought from the very beginning, and now Augustine realized that for all his intellectual discoveries and personal insights, he had not changed at all. (From In the Ruins of the Church, by R.R. Reno, a college professor of mine who is simply fabulous, and then I found this book that I didn’t even know he had written on the clearance shelf at Christianbook.com, and it took forever to get here but finally it did and it is wonderful. Seriously, when was the last time you read Nehemiah? Or anything else, by anyone, who drew on the story of Nehemiah?)
Maguire I find fascinating. He takes fantasy stories and kind of weaves a little of real human nature into them. There’s a common statement that most myth has some basis in fact somewhere. He shows how that could be, but instead of writing about myth, he does it with fairy tales. How could the whole Cinderella thing have been different? He does a pretty good job with some of the historical and other research around them, I enjoy most of his stuff. I’ve never seen the musical of Wicked, but I enjoyed the book tremendously, although I also don’t think it’s his best work.
I understand the problem with the Left Behind series (and so much Christian Fiction). Liked the first one or two, but the authors many times used 100 words when 2 would have done nicely. BORING! The Shack is not like that at all.
For better Christian fiction, I usually prefer authors like Stephen Lawhead or Ted Dekker. Of course, I tend to like the whole fantasy/scifi genre, which isn’t for everyone.
For some interesting fiction with good religious tones, I always liked Orson Scott Card. He’s a devout Mormon (which I am not), so he’s a scifi writer who treats religion in his stuff respectfully. Most scifi authors figure we’ll “outgrow the need” for religion. He also wrote some excellent historical fiction on women in the old testament.
Patrick — Yeah, I’ve read both “Wicked” and “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” or wicked stepsister, or whatever it was, and … hm. I guess I can’t really say that I’m a fan. I haven’t thought about the books in a while, so I can’t really pinpoint what it was. Just something about his stuff leaves me a little cold, I guess.
I do know that the musical version of Wicked is vastly different from the book. Haven’t seen it, but maybe I would actually like that better. Hahaha.