"To perhaps overgeneralize, book reviews are declarative statements; blog posts are questions."

A weekend of traveling has left me with no time to do any blogging today beyond posting a link to my contribution to the symposium on book blogging that Patrick Kurp and D. G. Myers have conducted over the past ten days.

There's little in my take on the form that will surprise any longtime readers of this blog, but it was certainly fun to have an excuse to think directly about what I hope I'm accomplishing here day after day. The other contributions--links to all of which are to be found low down in the left sidebar of D. G. Meyers's Commonplace Blog--offer plenty of pleasures: at a minimum, you should check out those of Mark Athitakis, who contributed the quote I used as this post's headline, and Patrick Kurp, who draws on poet David Ferry to remind us that "writing / Is a way of being happy."

Desert Library Books?

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Being not much of a joiner, I generally fail to participate in online memes and list-making, but one that was passed on by Terry Teachout and CAAF of About Last Night earlier this week was impossible to resist:

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

Below is the list I came up with; I've added a link to those about which I've written before on this blog.

Anthony Powell/A Dance to the Music of Time
Jorge Luis Borges/Labyrinths
Italo Calvino/Invisible Cities
Haruki Murakami/Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Wendell Berry/A Place on Earth
Homer/The Odyssey
Herman Melville/Moby-Dick
Roberto Bolaño/The Savage Detectives
James Gould Cozzens/Guard of Honor
Leo Tolstoy/Anna Karenina
James Boswell/Life of Johnson
Thomas Hardy/Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Raymond Chandler/The Long Goodbye
Marcel Proust/In Search of Lost Time
Sarah Orne Jewett/The Country of the Pointed Firs

Some that nearly made the cut, and on a different day might have done so:

Iris Murdoch/The Nice and the Good
Evelyn Waugh/A Handful of Dust
P. G. Wodehouse/Summer Lightning
Charles Dickens/Our Mutual Friend
Rebecca West/The Fountain Overflows
Claire Tomalin/Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
John Crowley/Aegypt
F. Scott Fitzgerald/The Great Gatsby
Juan Rulfo/Pedro Paramo

I don't know that my list, even in its expanded version, tells you much about me; perhaps merely that my taste, though definitely biased towards the English, is fairly catholic, varying wildly depending on mood and circumstance.

Do take a look at CAAF's list (with which I have no titles in common) and Terry's list (with which I share three), both of which feature books worth recalling. Other lists worth checking out that I've come across so far are those of Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence (who eschews the term "meme," choosing instead the more pleasant and apt "literary parlor game"), who shares my fondness for Boswell and reminds me that Joseph Mitchell really ought to have found a place, and D. G. Myers, with whose list mine overlaps not a whit--though the titles I've read on his list are nonetheless favorites, which makes me think I ought to investigate the rest as well.

And yours, dear reader?