1,000!

Here's to one thousand posts on G.p!

No reason not to burn the millenial entry on a book meme. Remember memes? This one comes couresy of Yglesias and PG.

1. One book that's changed your life

The books that come to mind are all classics—all poems, in fact. Dante's Inferno was the first book that revealed to me what sort of work literature can do, so I think it takes top prize. The Aeneid runs a close second for being the first book I read after deciding that literature was crucial. You know, first kiss after the first kiss? I don't know that any book has "changed my life" in the way that the question probably intends.

2. One book that you have read more than once

Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita I've read probably it a dozen times. Once, three times in a row.

3. One book you would want on a desert island.

Something that lends itself to endless rereading, right? Swann's Way or War in Peace would satisfice. But maybe there's another way: a book that lends itself to endless hallucinatory permutations! Flaubert's Tempataion of Saint Anthony fits that bill (NB: I read it on a bus). The Book of Revelation is the industry standard in quality visions, but what if visions don't fuel visions the way I assume they would?

4. One book that made you cry

Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz was the last one I can remember. I'll well up over especially lyrical passages in fiction, but none has ever moved me to tears—just to nose-scrunching.

5. One book that made you laugh

Bad question! If I say Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, you will think I guffaw over the Holocaust, and if I say John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, I'll seem to lack the appropriate taste and sensitivity for dark, literary comedy! Eh, most books I read make me laugh, I think I tend to choose them for that; but just to be clear: the Holocaust is not hilarious.

6. One book you wish had been written

My breakout novel, when I was 23? I can't come up with a great answer to this question. And so, my novel languishes.

7. One book you wish had never been written

Victor Milan's Cybernetic Samurai. It was well established in my sixth-grade class that this book was the single one in the library that contained a graphic sex scene, a truth to which the broken spine around page x attested. Of course I was the one caught smirking over it the day that the teacher's cute daughter was subbing, and naturally enough, when she confiscated the book she couldn't help but notice the section bookmarked by so many hormonal headcases over the years.

8. One book you are currently reading

I just bought Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red.

9. One book you've been meaning to read

Charles Palliser, The Quincunx, which comes recommended by the smarties at Crooked Timber and has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf for a turn.

Apostropher, Becks, Emily—you have been memed!