That new meme

There's a books meme making the rounds, and (in the absence of anything interesting to report) I tagged myself to do it.

1. Name one book that changed your life

Jokey but true answer: Cruden's Complete Concordance to the King James Bible, hardly a day passes when I don't look up something or other. Knowing the sources, recognizing the connections, enriches my reading and increases my happiness therein.

Straight answer: Albert Camus, The myth of Sisyphus which fell into my hands at a time when I was plagued by thoughts of hopelessness and futility. Camus does not attempt to imbue the world with significance, but rather says (with Ecclesiastes, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare and Epictetus) that what matters is not the world but how you choose (!) to understand it and what you choose to do about it. The final sentence, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," was a revelation, a revolution, a paradigm switch.

(It's a short and comfortably readable essay, available online. Recommended.)

2. One book you've read more than once

I re-read most books that I bother to acquire (which could be stated as: I only buy books that I expect will be worth re-reading), because I find that it takes at least two readings to squeeze all the juice out of any book. (For example: I've read Nietsche's Jenseits von Gut und Böse twice, and would be lying if I said that I've really understood a tenth of it yet.)

The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness are probably the books I most often re-read, just because the tales are so marvellously well told, in such beautiful language. (Anyone wanting to see what "flawless, scintillating prose" really looks like should read these novels.) I've read Proust's A la Recherche de temps perdu two-and-a-half times and will surely read it again. I've read (most of) the Bible twice, both KJV and Tyndale. I re-read Dickens, Hesse and William Gibson on a fairly regular basis.

I went through a phase of reading Günter Grass' Hundejahre every four years or so, and found it significantly different each time: I read it first as an adventure story, friendship lost and found during wartime; the second time I read it as a J'Accuse indictment of Martin Heidegger, the characters were merely puppets riding on his shoulders like the good and bad angels in cartoons, asking "were you a Nazi, and why are you silent?"; most recently (after seeing the magnificent Heimat film series) I was horrified to realize at the end that the only true, convinced Nazi had been the Jewish victim/survivor Goldmund, and that he still is a Nazi. (I own two copies of the book, in English and German, but looking up the names just now could find neither. How odd, have I lent them out?)

3. One book you'd want on a desert island

Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.

4. One book that made you laugh

What first comes to mind is P.G. Wodehouse's marvellous Jeeves novels; pick one, they're all great.

5. One book that made you cry

Dickens' Our mutual friend, damn and blast the man. It's such a blatant tearjerker, and so elbow-nudgingly signalled in advance: you say to yourself, "Oh Christ, he's at it again, here it comes," but oh it works so well. I would not care to meet anyone who could read the death of Betty Higden without crying.

6. One book you wish you'd written

Edward Tufte, Envisioning information. A truly marvellous compendium of good and bad examples of ways to present information so that it is clearly and simply understandable - and not coincidentally also quite pretty. Anyone who deals professionally with information in any form must own this book.

7. One book you wish had never been written

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea. What an egregiously overrated pile of crap that was. There's more wisdom to be found in Albert Camus' toenail-cuttings than in Sartre's navelgazing.

8. One book you're currently reading

My little book for the bathroom cabinet this month is the Gesammelte Gedichte of Manfred Rommel, former Mayor of Stuttgart (and son of the Desert Fox), short humorous verses in dialect. A not untypical sample:

Ehret die Alten
Eh sie erkalten

9. One book you've been meaning to read

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks. It's one of the cornerstones of modern German literature, one cannot read far into any theory or criticism without coming across it. I doubt whether my German is yet up to the task.

10. No tagging.

If the idea appeals to you, tag yourself (and leave a comment).