... One at a Time. (Hat tip again to Dave Lull.)
I'm not sure if any book has changed my life exactly - though Donald Newlove's Those Drinking Days may have, now that I come to think of it. Like Terry, I read a lot of books that I like more than once (at least I used to, before I got this job). But the book I guess I read most often is The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. But I suppose if I had to take only one with me to a desert island, I'd pick Montaigne, too. Lots of books have made me laugh, but none more than Anthony Burgess's Inside Mr. Enderby. Lots of books have made me cry, too, but the one that comes to mindjust now is A.S. Byatt's Possession. Wanting to write a book someone else has written is too much like wanting to be somebody else and I've never wanted to be anybody but me. I suppose I wish The Da Vinci Code because it's so depressing that such tripe would prove so popular. But not really - at least Dan Brown isn't teaching kids how to write anymore. Tonight I will finish Carlo Lucarelli's Carte Blanche and tomorrow begin The Three Musketeers. And one of these I'm going to get to Proust.
Laugh? The books that have made me do that are too numerous to mention. Cry? Well, I suppose there must have been several, but the only one that sticks in my head is Peter de Vries's "The Blood of the Lamb." Which, it being De Vries, also made me laugh many times before it made me cry. That was three decades ago. I re-read it a couple of years ago and, while tears did not flow, it left me with a lingering feeling of sadness. De Vries, who went to the choir eternal 13 years ago, was quite the writer.
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