double dog dare

A Fool in the Forest recently threw down the gauntlet and passed on this meme to me. There's also a musical version floating around out there to which I haven't been invited, but maybe I'll give it a go some other time. It was sort of hard to pick just one answer to some of these questions, so I decided I didn't have to.

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

If I were feeling particularly dissolute, I wouldn't mind going on a bender Under the Volcano. If I could live in a non-fiction book while single, I'd love to hang out as a Bachelor Girl. However, if I had to pick just one fictional world, it'd probably be the mysterious, romantic, and literary Barcelona of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Maybe it's the Michael Jackson trial, but the last crush on a fictional character I remember having was on Ender in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. It's much more likely for me to have a crush on the author who created the character.

3. The last book you bought was...?

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

4. The last book you read was...?

Queer People, Carroll & Garrett Graham

5. What are you currently reading?

• Hollywood Utopia, Justine Brown
• Los Angeles: City of Dreams, Harry Carr
• Ape & Essence, Aldous Huxley
• Writing L.A., edited by David Ulin
• Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader

6. Five books you would take to a desert island...

• A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust: because I read the entire damn thing two years ago and already forgot most of it...plus there are new translations
• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace: because I would finally have time to read this behemoth
• John Dollar, Marianne Wiggins: because it would remind me how much worse off I could have it
• Diaries, Volumes 1-5, Virginia Woolf: because I can't imagine a better mind for company
• Art: A World History: because I'd need something else to look at besides palm trees and the ocean
  

7. Who are you passing this stick on to and why?

Anyone listed under "Music" to the right...