In the memetime

Just to lighten the tone and allay any fears that SWSL is going the way of the po-faced political blog - a meme!

Courtesy of Pete comes a meme with a literary flavour.

Which book would you memorise if you were on a desert island?

(I haven't read 'Fahrenheit 451' either.)

It would have to be something packed with memorable phrases. Probably 'Money' by Martin Amis, or a Will Self novel. Time would pass quicker if you were luxuriating in their language.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Off the top of my head, no - though the unnamed girl who appears fleetingly on the beach in Joyce's 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' has a mysterious allure. I suspect this is probably because the whole scene is constructed from the point of view of Stephen Dedalus. Her desirability is a function of the romantic visions in which he is engrossed at the time.

The last book you bought is?

D H Lawrence's 'Selected Letters', with the 1932 introduction by Aldous Huxley. That was bought with a mind to expanding my collection of Lawrence volumes from the classic orange Penguin paperback series, though. The last book I bought purely for pleasure was 'Tragically I Was An Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook'.

The last book you finished is?

Milan Kundera's 'The Unbearable Lightness Of Being'. That reminds me - I really must post some thoughts on it...

What are you currently reading?

Lawrence's 'Sea And Sardinia' - the first of his travel books that I've read. I was inspired to give it a go partly by Geoff Dyer's enthusiastic championing of it in 'Out Of Sheer Rage' and partly by the brilliance of some of the characterisations of place in the fiction, particularly 'Kangaroo'. So far it's not quite matched up to the expectations set by Dyer (he labels it Lawrence's best book), but in many ways it's vintage Lawrence - piercingly observant and occasionally lyrical as well as frequently opinionated and angry.

Five books you would take to a desert island?

It seems a terrible shame to have to omit things like Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway' or Graham Greene's 'Brighton Rock', but the five book rule must be respected...

'Ulysses', first and foremost - you could live inside that book for years. Likewise 'Women In Love', the one Lawrence novel I'll restrict myself to. A volume of poetry would make for a change, and most of those in Larkin's 'Collected Poems' bear re-reading time and again. 'England's Dreaming' by Jon Savage, simply so that it finally got read - I could have chosen other dauntingly large books currently gathering dust on my shelves, such as Don DeLillo's 'Underworld' and Thomas Pynchon's 'Mason & Dixon', but non-fiction would provide a bit of variety. And last but not least, the dictionary - the OED if possible, though the multi-volume version would be stretching the definition of "a book" a bit. You can never know too many words. The dictionary is to me what an encyclopedia is to others.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (three people) and why?

He Who Cannot Be Named, because he devours page upon page of both fiction and non-fiction and always has an opinion on what he reads (not always repeatable in polite company).

Vicky, because her taste in authors is near impeccable.

Ian, because I want to see how many volumes of philosophy he chooses! Update: Well, now there's a turn-up for the books! Not only had Ian already done it, but he'd also already passed it on to me...