I feel that I should not be doing this

But I cannot stop myself. Curse you, fair Anthony.

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?
   Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban.
2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
   Hahaha.  All of my crushes are on fictional characters.
3. The last book you bought is:
   Three-Cornered World by Natsume Soseki and The Highroad around Modernism by Robert Neville (know nothing about him but the cover was garish, so...)
4. The last book you read:
   Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey.
5. What are you currently reading?
   Actually: Three-Cornered World.  Theoretically: that, and The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico by Croce and The Faerie Queene by Spenser.
6. Five books you would take to a desert island:
   Now, the approaches people take here puzzle me.  Is it to be presumed that you're going to be rescued in a reasonable amount of time, or are you going to be there for the rest of your days?  Because if the latter, I don't understand why people would say they'd want to bring all these intellectually compelling or interesting books, since reading them would naturally (I presume) lead you to want to discuss them with others, or read other books they reference, or seek to refine your understanding, or something like that.  But that would just make your isolation all the more intolerable.  And how much time or inclination would you really have for contemplating the eternal after a long day seeing to your basic necessities?  Maybe you'd have lots, but I imagine I'd want to spend a lot of my time doing such things as sleeping.  (Though one hears of solitaries accompanying themselves solely with a volume of Horace, say.)  Same thing for the maximizers of length—yeah, you could bring the unabridged Golden Bough, Proust, A Dance to the Music of Time, that long series by C. P. Snow, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Goethe's collected works, but the best use you'd get is shelter, I think (maybe heat).  So here's what I'd bring:
   1. The complete Calvin & Hobbes
   2. The complete Pogo
   3. The complete Peanuts
   4. The complete works of Thomas Browne
   5. Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (this one was even more arbitrary than the others)
7. I apparently supposed to designate three people to answer these questions in their own turn, but ... I'll pass.

Comments

[Austro]

Damn it Mr. Wolfson! I was JUST passing this meme on to you and thought I just check to make sure you hadn't done it weeks ago already.... what goes around comes around.

So... what now?

[ben wolfson]

I believe seppuku is called for.

[Austro]

Now where did I put that carving knife?

[Austro]

BTW: "Strangers and Brothers" was the title you were looking for. My favourite is "The Corridors of Power"

[Joe Drymala]

I guess you can only mention Riddley Walker so many times before I'm forced to read it. Is it really all written in an invented dialect, though?

[ben wolfson]

Yeah, but it's pretty comprehensible. The first sentence is "On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen." Not hard.

[Joe Drymala]

Hmm.

[RJ Eskow]

I've never seen your blog before. I came here because of a skippy link. But you picked "Riddley Walker" as the book to be? Hey! I picked "Riddley Walker" too! (I was tagged by The Heretik, if you know him.) What's up with that?

This looks like a terrific blog. I'll definitely keep reading.

[ben wolfson]

Hey, thanks. But what's a skippy link? I have never encountered that term before.

[RJ Eskow]

a "skippy link" a link from the blog "skippy the bush kangaroo" - (xnerg.blogspot.com). I guess it sounded odd ...