Stolen Meme

1. The Book I’m Currently Reading

Number9Dream by David Mitchell.  Eiji Miyake has come to Tokyo to find his father but becomes embroiled in impossibly twisted complications including, yes, mobsters.

2. The Last Book I Finished

The last book I didn’t finish was The Scroll of the Dead by David Stuart Davies, a “Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” book.  And before that, I read a magazine, which isn’t properly a book.  So the answer to this one is Negotiating with the Dead by Margaret Atwood, a collection of seven lectures/essays about writing and writing theory.

3. The Next Book I Want to Read

This is always the hardest question.  I’m considering reading my most recent acquisition (see below), or else rereading the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin, or else rereading the Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner.  Or I’m also considering changing my mind several times before I choose.

4. The Last Book I Bought

“Bought” here reads more like “acquired,” since I obtained When the King Comes Home by Carolyn Stevermer by trading in other books and receiving store credit.  It’s fantasy, I’d enjoyed the Wrede & Stevermer books, and the first page caught my interest well enough.

5. The Last Book I Was Given

You’d think that my imminent graduation would have produced more books for this category, ahem, but the last book I received as a gift came from my mother: A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley, the third in the delightful Flavia de Luce series.

Oh, Very Well

As if I could resist an opportunity to write about books.

I bring you the (belated) World Book Day meme, courtesy of Chera.

The Book I Am Reading:  The Night Calls by David Pirie.  It’s from my Unread Books list, which, although I failed to read solely from it for a month, I am still whittling down.  It’s the second book in a series called “The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes,” even though it’s actually about Arthur Conan Doyle as a medical student and his real-life inspiration for Holmes, Dr. Joseph Bell.  But you don’t have to pretend very hard to read Bell as Holmes or Doyle as Watson, and the turn-of-the-century Edinburgh setting feels authentic, if the narrator-Doyle waxes a bit melodramatic at times.  Supposedly this book is the introduction of the Moriarty analogue, so I’m eager to see whether this so-called real-life villain lives up to the fictional one.

The Book I Am Writing:  It doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s about a missing spaceship and a comic science fiction mystery duo.  One of the detectives is a technophobe, concerned about losing his identity on the internet, and the other one can tell when you’re lying.  Always.

The Book I Love Most:  It’s a three-way tie between The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and Persuasion by Jane Austen.  I know that was four books, but you can’t really expect me to choose just three.

The Last Book I Received As A Gift:  Hmm.  Um.  I’m not sure.  Christmas feels like a long time ago, and I know I’ve bought books with Christmas gift cards.  But the last book I actually unwrapped was Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, on Christmas evening.  It is a classic feminist utopia, a modernization of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.  Now to get my hands on The Female Man by Joanna Russ.

The Last Book I Gave As A Gift:  Gifts by Ursula K. Le Guin, because I thought it name appropriate.

The Nearest Book to Me:  As I’m sitting at my desk, I’m eighteen inches away from my UKL shelf, and there’s a Bible and a book I’m borrowing (Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel) on the desk’s hutch, but the book at my elbow is called Time and the Other by Johannes Fabian, an iconic anthropology text loaned to me by a professor for research for my thesis.  I’m about to write a paragraph about how the “ethnographic present,” which serves to distance the observed Other in both space and time, is related to the defamiliarizing techniques of science fiction, which make something familiar into something strange, marvelous, or uncanny, as well as the reverse.