Andrew tagged me, so here goes:
1. Name a book that changed your life.
The Official Guide to Success by Tom Hopkins, which I found in my local library and which contained the (for me) revolutionary idea that you should never go into any negotiating situation (particularly if negotiating for a pay-rise, or negotiating pay at a job interview) if you haven't any savings in the bank (he calls it go-to-town-money or hold-out money). The idea is that savings give you confidence so that when you say "Take it or leave it", the other party knows you are serious. I never looked back after this - it really is true that people (particularly bosses) can tell if you have financial worries and will settle for less just to have a job.
2. One book you've read more than once
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. It's a girl thing, but I love this book so much I practically know it by heart.
3. One book you'd want on a desert island
Wilderness Survivors Guide, or something like that - I assume I'd be too busy trying to survive to have any time to read for pleasure.
4. One book that made you laugh
A History of England by Jane Austen, which announces that "There will be very few Dates in this History", summarises Mary I's reign with "Many were the people who fell martyrs to the protestant Religion during her reign; I suppose not fewer than a dozen", characterises Elizabeth as "that disgrace to humanity, that pest of society" and Charles I as "an amiable monarch" .
5. One book that made you cry
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which is a Victorian weepie about a little girl who is at boarding school, and when her rich father dies a pauper, she is banished to the garret, complete with rats. I first read this age 11 and sobbed buckets - it has all the horror of the Victorian era - the orphan thing, the riches-to-rags thing, the cruelty of wicked Victorian headmistress, whom I am quite sure must have been a Tory.
6. One book you wish you've written
Anything by Austen.
7. One book you wish had never been written
Bleak House by Dickens. I tried to read this book maybe half a dozen times, but never get beyond the first few chapters. It's dense, overwritten and tedious, and you lose the will to live within a few pages.
8. One book you are currently reading
Too busy to read at the moment
9. One book you've been meaning to read
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
10. Now tag five people
2 comments:
BTW
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Is soooo significant. Even now as East and West clash yet again. Get readin' girl.
Bleak House is meant to be a take on how suffocating the legal process is, so perhaps Dickens was too successful in that regard!
Book I wish I'd written is Robert Parker's Wines of the World - as that means I'd have got to sample all those amazing vintages.
The funniest book I've ever read is the first half (it becomes a bit gruelling in the second) is Bonfire of the Vanities, part of which is a sort of modern version of Bleak House.
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