Book meme as a late lunch digests

[bktheirregular]

Snurched from taraljc, and from yahtzee63...

1. What books are your comfort reading -- the ones you slink back to in times of stress?

The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh.

2. What was your favorite book as a child, and why?

Gaah ... I read so much as a kid I don't even remember. And not just kids' books, either... well ... if I were put to it: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

ETA: Whoops. Make that All the President's Men.

3. What was your favorite book as an adolescent, and why?

Oops. The Feynman book would belong here. Which would still leave me a little stumped for kids' books.

4. What is the most unread category of books gathering dust on your bookshelf -- the books you've bought but just never get around to reading?

Biographies and memoirs, I suppose. I've got Andrei Sakharov's memoirs, Anatoly Dobrynin, C. Everett Koop, though John Dean's Blind Ambition has been well-thumbed as a counterpoint to All the President's Men...

5. What kind of books would you like to say you read, but never do?

Poetry.

6. What's the oddest book you've ever read?

Gabriel Garcia Marques' Chronicle of a Murder Foretold, probably because I was reading it in the original Spanish.

7. What book were you never able to get through, despite the recommendations of people you respect?

As I Lay Dying. Which is even worse because it was an English assignemnt in high school, it's supposed to be a classic, Faulkner and all that, but I just could never understand what was going on. Personal, though? Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Lord of the Rings.

9. What's your favorite short story...or do you even have one?

Would Conan Doyle's The Valley of Fear count as a short story?

10. The desert island. Three books (and collected works don't count; if you want Lord of the Rings it'll cost you all three slots). Go:

The Spirit of St. Louis. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. And maybe Stranger in a Strange Land, because I haven't gotten around to that one either.