AAGGHHH!! I'M HIT!

...by a speeding meme, in this case the One Book Quiz. Yehuda got me. It's certainly an interesting subject, and without further ado...

One Book that Changed My Life. Gotta go with Siddhartha here; it is probably reading this book that was the very last straw that broke me out of my downward spiral of depression and some self-destructive social behavior. Thanks again to Adam for making me read this.

One Book I've Read More than Once. Almost every book of comics, and humor book, I've read umpteen times until I've virtually memorized it. Poetry--same thing. How many times have I read Petrarch? But if I have to give a single answer...The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov's satirical masterpiece.

One Book to Bring to a Desert Island. I still say GK Chesterton's supposed answer ("Thomas's Guide to Practical Shipbuilding") is the right answer, but it's become a cliché unto itself. (And it has become something of an unofficial ritual to cite it when doing such lists.) I'd have to go with either the Bible or the complete essays of George Orwell. Make of me what you will from that statement. (Good luck.)

One Book that Made Me Laugh. Interior Desecrations by James Lileks--a wonderful skewering of seventies interior design. Lucky me, I only had to make it through 2.5 years of the seventies, but I still remember some harvest gold around the house. If you find this book in the store, and you're not sure whether to buy it, turn to page 80. After history, I have more humor books than anything else.

One Book that Made Me Cry. This is a harder one. Books don't affect me like this, while there are movies that do it. Some books make me mad, lots make me laugh, some make me depressed, but that's different from the current challenge. Am I just too detached? Wait--I got one. Boyce and DiPrima's Elementary Differential Equations. I cried over that.

One Book I Wish I'd Written. I feel like this is my cue to suck up to current or potential future graduate advisors. But there are so many, and I can just pick one, that I, sadly, cannot fulfill this solemn duty. I'll go with a former professor: Peter Green's Alexander to Actium, his incredibly erudite and wide-ranging study of the Hellenistic era.

One Book I Wish had Never been Written. Yehuda has the obvious answer, or rather pegged the obvious theme to an answer. I don't want to belittle the great evils of history (and the books that propelled them), but I do want to take the question in a little bit of a different direction. I'll go with Arming America by Michael Bellesiles. (I recommend against trying to divine my position on gun control from this choice.) The whole story makes me mad, and I find the book to be basically an affront to the profession, on which I am on the second-from-bottom rung of the ladder. (The "normal" plagiarists--Doris Kearns Goodwin, anyone?--are in a similar position, but I find their sins to generally be less flamboyant.) It's also a data point for my theory that when politics and history meet, great violence is done to the history. (And this is one of the areas of the greatest bipartisan "cooperation.")

One Book I'm Currently Reading. Shea and Hess's Pea Ridge, one of the great campaign books. I'm rereading it for a class assignment: Should Curtis or Sigel be rung up on charges of dereliction of duty for their behavior on the Pea Ridge campaign?

One Book I've been Meaning to Read. How long has The Influence of Sea Power upon History been sitting on the nightstand? A while. A long while. I'm about eight pages in. Other than that, there's Gibbon.

Tags:

Mark, Brian: Go to it. (If you haven't already. I may have forgotten.)