books...books...books...

TAGGED FOR THE BOOK MEME by Collin Kelley ... then pass on to five more bloggers.


One book that changed your life: Bashō's Oku no hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior) was a wonderful hammer to my head.

One book that you've read more than once: The book I've read the most would have to be T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land – out of a need to get to the bottom of the well. The book I've read the most out of a sheer love of words – Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III.

One book you'd want on a desert island: I would take The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Johnson edition) & The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin reading edition), tie them together with twine to ensure their counting as one, then argue with anyone who tried to stop me.

One book that made you laugh: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

One book that made you cry: The Sound and the Fury was the first major work of fiction that I read, without stopping, straight through the night – finishing as the sun came up. I couldn't help myself.


One book that you wish had been written: Lynda Hull's fourth collection... The loss of Hull to poetry can't be measured, but surely, it must be as crucial as the death of Hart Crane. At least for me. Her poetry is on the level of Bishop, James Wright, Crane, Lowell, Plath. And we were never able to read her best work.


One book that you wish had never been written: Anything by William J. Bennett. America: The Last Best Hope, Volume I? Please...

One book you're currently reading: Locales: Poems from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Ed. Fred Chappell (LSU, 2003)

One book you've been meaning to read: Underworld by Don DeLillo

Tag: C.E., Laurel, Suzanne, beLLe, and G.