(no subject)

[therealsnape]

As usual,kellychambliss  provided some excellent procrastination material. I love bookmemes!

1) What author do you own the most books by?
Agatha Christie. I own practically the complete works, 6 or 7 still missing, but since I want them from a special paperback edition I can only score additions in second hand bookshops. And I want to get that very edition because I love neat, matching rows in my library. Yes, this is fairly odd behaviour.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
Manon Lescaut . Should throw out the Dutch version as I will never read it, but it is part of a series from my father's library. I don't destroy series.

 3) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Minerva MgGonagall from Harry Potter.
And very, very secretly, the Marquise de Merteuil from Liaisons Dangereuses.
(Please, do not picture screaming, raving Glenn Close. I'm not that odd. Glenn couldn't help it though, she looked the part. It's the scenario-writer who should be ashamed of himself. I hope there is a small space in Dante's Hell for OOC-writers like him.

4) What book have you read more than any other?
Pride and Prejudice

5) What was your favorite book when you were 10-years-old?
Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek, by Thea Beckman. Now filmed in English as Crusade in Jeans. About a boy who helps testing a time-machine. He gets stuck in the Childrens' Crusade.
And the Little House books

6) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?

A book about an American woman who ends up in 15th century England. Completely unbelievable plot. Stopped at chapter 2. Sorry, can't even recal title or author. 

7) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
The House Gun, Nadine Gordimer.

8) If you could tell everyone you know to read one book, what would it be?
Depends on the language. I make all my English students read Pride and Prejudice and I recently made a French student read L'Etranger (Camus).
Somebody, help! How do I put accents in rich text?

 

9) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?

Essais by Michel de Montaigne.

10) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
The French, of course, I read French at university.

11) Shakespeare, Milton or Chaucer?
Shakespeare, but I still love the miller (he knew the taverns well in every town, my kind of guy!)

12) Austen Or Eliot? 
Austen. I should have read Mill on the Floss in high school, but didn't. Still feel guilty about that. And I never could really warm to Dorothea Brooke, but I seem to be in excellent company.  

13) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
Russian Literature.
 

 

14) What is your favorite novel?
Pride and Prejudice in English. Liaisons Dangereuses in French, because of the absolutely evil sense of humour of the two main characters.

15) Play?
Macbeth.

16) Poem?

Bonjour Tristesse, by Paul Eluard. In English: So are you to my thoughts as food to life, Shakespeare. 

17) Essay?
Any one by Montaigne, who invented the genre. I did my master's thesis on his work.

18) Short story?
Quite frankly, I dislike short stories. The only writer whose short stories I really enjoy is Maeve Binchy. She creates a lovable character in one paragraph. If only I could ...

19) Non-fiction?

The Autumn of the Middle Ages by J. Huizinga.

20) Graphic novel?
The Asterix books. All those puns, works of art, real persons, there's so much behind the actual story.

21) Memoir?

The Sport of Queens by Dick Francis 

22) History?
Books about the 100 year war (France-England) and the French renaissance. I love to read about Catherine de Medicis and her wonderfully disfunctional family. In our age, those children would be put into care.

 

23) Mystery or noir?
I think I prefer good old-fashioned detective stories.

24) Science fiction?
Hate it. Unless Terry Pratchett counts. But I suppose he should be called fantasy?

25) Who is your favorite writer?
Austen.
.

 

26) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Never understood what people saw in that Celestine Promise-chap. (Hope I got the English title right.) It was healing, in that it sent me to deep slumber within 2 minutes, three nights running. So that's what I have read of it, 2 minutes worth of blinking.

27) What are you reading right now?

This book meme.
All right, not funny.
P.D. James, A Taste for Death, Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon.

 

 

Now comes the hard work: trying to make the lj-cut thing work.
Well, did it, I did not intend the grey lines, though.
And getting a proper link to Kelly's page. 
I may be many things, I'm not a computer genius. That's why I like Harry Potter. Quills.