Hurray for memes!

Stolen from Dewey, Imani and Emily:

What are you reading right now?

Oh boy, everything? Well, Siri Huvstvedt, What I Loved (and it’s brilliant – very enthusiastic post to come), Manon Lescaut by the Abbe Prevost (luscious), Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (very clever and intriguing), Julien Green, Le Visionnaire (only just started this), American Fictions by Elizabeth Hardwick (just fantastic), a biography of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade (I’m fascinated by her) and, because I am never less than honest with you bloggers, Mistral’s Daughter by Judith Krantz (I wanted to know if she was as good as I remembered her to be, and she is! Thankfully, no goldfish in this one).

Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with that?

On the immediate list: The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng, The Falls, by Joyce Carol Oates, Sylvie Germain’s Le Livre des nuits, Carlos Baker’s Emerson Among the Eccentrics, and I do believe I have a few suggestions from my dear blogging friends for books about reading that I’ll be following up!

What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now?

Ummm, I kind of encourage a steady throughput in the bathroom, so no reading matter. If my husband disappears in there with The Economist, whole days can pass.

What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read?

Bernard Noel’s Le Chateau de Cene for the scene in which a man has oral sex with a guard dog. And there were other bits I skipped. I had to read it for some research – honest! – and it occurred to me that, sometimes, academics is a crazy way to earn a living.

What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone?

William Maxwell’s The Chateau. Maxwell is one of the most glorious stylists I know and I adore this book. It makes you feel serene to read it. Please do not confuse it with the Bernard Noel book which also has the word ‘Chateau’ in the title, for there the similarity ends.

Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they?

Alas the university library is too big a place for the librarians to know my name, but from the way they start ringing up the cash till for overdue fines from the second they clap eyes on me, I think they may know me.
Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all?

I cannot persuade enough people to read William Maxwell. Also, there’s a French author called Louise Lambrichs who isn’t well-known even in her own country and yet she is utterly fantastic.

Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving?

If I’m eating alone then, yes, I will read, and I have occasionally taken books to the bath with me, although I fear a lapse in concentration could result in disaster. As a teenager I would read and watch television at the same time, which used to amuse my parents (what have we got two eyes for, after all?) but as I get older my ability to multi-task diminishes and everything else on the list warrants my full and undivided attention.
When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits?

When I was little my reading habits meant that I never spent any time with other children.

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?

Oh, now, this is such a sad question for me because I am far too old to stay up late reading, and even worse, I can’t remember the last book I simply could not put down. But several have been gripping enough that I was reading them when I should have been doing other things: Sue Grafton’s A for Alibi was great, I did really enjoy Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and a novel that sticks in my mind from a while back is Mary McCarthy’s The Group. That was just wonderful.