The Book Meme

Well, this one comes from RW over at Chasing Vincenzo, where he got it from Man About Mayfair who got it from The Hatemonger's Quarterly who was sent it by Postmodern Conservative after being tagged by John Tabin who was tagged by Dave Weigel who was sent it through the Dredge Report who got it from Todd A who saw it at John Baker who first read it at It's A Crime where... strangely enough... the trail goes cold.

(I just copied and pasted that whole paragraph from RW… seemed too much to type on my own…)

Yes, yes. A meme is a cop-out way to break in the new blog, but think of a blog as a house, where you get to christen (wink-wink) each room... This is a christening of my meme room....

(Now try to get that image out of your head...)

So, without further ado, "The Book Meme":

1. One book that changed your life
What I saw at the Revolution, by Peggy Noonan. Not so much the subject matter, but the evocative writing captured a moment and allowed me to see the nobility and majesty of government work. Yeah, sounds corny, but I'm corny about governance.

2. One book you have read more than once
All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. Densely packed with a language gone in America now. But the subject matter; the education, debasement, and ressurection of an aide in politics, speaks to me still.

3. One book you would want on a desert island
The Stand by Stephen King. First off, I love it and could rerad it over and over. Second, at over 1,000 pages it would kill a lot of time, and third, it would burn for a long, long time if I used it as a rescue beacon.

4. One book that made you cry
Hmm... When Character Was King by Peggy Noonan. The whole Reagan thing. Don't ask me to explain it. Unless you were a teenager in the early eighties you'd never understand. The man was our grandfather, god, and George Washington all wrapped up in one.

5. One book that made you laugh
1,001 Stupidist Things Ever Said. There's a quote in there from Marion Barry (the former mayor of Washington, DC) that gets me every time: "The contagious people of Washington have stood firm against diversity during this long period of increment weather". (You know, some people deserve the representation they get from their elected officials... You keep voting for these bozos, you deserve what you get.)

6. One book you wish had been written
I wish I had taken my college thesis on The Big Dig and the political machinations surrounding the beginings of it (I wrote it in 1994) and turned it into a book. Too late now, everything's been written and public attention has been diverted from the astounding series of alliances that got this thing started to the failure to build it correctly... (Plus I couldn't find it now if my life depended on it.)

7. One book you wish had never been written
I've gotta go with RW on this one. The Communist Manifesto has cost millions of lives and caused untold misery for billions of people in the twentieth century.

8. One book you are currently reading
Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris. The second of his Theodore Roosevelt biographies.

9. One book you have been meaning to read
I've read Freakonomics, Blink, and The Tipping Point, so I guess I should read The World is Flat to round out my "new thinking for the 21st century" curriculum...

There. Post number one... Next: breaking in the CatBlog room!