Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Just One Book meme

One book that changed your life:
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

One book that you have read more than once:
All Creatures Great & Small by James Herriot

One book you want on a desert island: my Bible. I'd love a good survival guide or appropriate plant encyclopedia as well, of course.


One book that made you laugh:
Ogden Nash collection

You can see a number of them -here. I've put three examples of Mr Nash's wit from this site



“Unfortunately, It’s The Only Game In Town”
Often I think that this shoddy world would be more nifty
If all the ostensibly fifty-fifty proposition in it were truly fifty-fifty.
It’s unfortunate that the odds
Are rigged by the gods.
I do not wish to be impious.
But I have observed that all human hazards that mathematics would declare to be fifty-fifty are actually at least fifty-one-forty-nine in favor of Mount Olympus.
In solitaire, you face the choice of which of two black queens to put on a red king; the chance of choosing right is an even one, not a long one,
Yet three times out of four you choose the wrong one.
You emerge from a side street onto an avenue, with the choice of turning either right or left to reach a given address.
Do you walk the wrong way? Yes.
My outraged sense of fair play it would salve
If just once I could pull the right curtain cord for the first time, or guess which end of the radiator lid conceals the valve.
Why when choosing between two lanes leading to a highway tollhouse do I take the one containing a lady who first hands the collector a twenty-dollar bill and next drops her change on the ground?
Why when quitting a taxi do I invariably down the door handle when it should be upped and up it when it should be downed?
By the cosmic shell shame I am spellbound.
There is no escape; I am like an oyster, shellbound?
Yes, surely the gods operate according to the fiercest exhortation W. C. Fields ever spake:
Never give a sucker an even break.


“The Eel”

I don’t mind eels
Except as meals,
And the way they feels.”



"Peekabo, I Almost See You"
Middle aged life is merry, and I love to lead it,
But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm isn’t long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it.
And your friends get jocular, so you can go to the oculist,
And of all your friends he is the joculist,
So over his facetiousness let us skim,
Only noting that he has been waiting for you ever since you said Good Evening to his grandfather clock under the impression that it was him,
And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? And he says one set of glasses won’t do.
You need two.
One for reading Erle Stanley Gardener’s Perry Mason and Keats’s “Endymion” with,
And the other for wasling around without saying Hello to a strange wymion with.
So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to put on your reading glasses, and then remembering that your reading glasses are upstairs or in the car,
And then you can’t find your seeing glasses again because without them on you can’t see where they are.
Enough of such mishaps, they would try the patience of an ox,
I prefer to forget both pairs of glasses and pass my declining years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.



One book that made you cry:
Bleak House

One book you wish would have been written:
'Why We Now Agree There are Other Valid Scientific Theories for the Origins of Life: An Apology' by the NSF

One book you wish had never been written:
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. It would have been great if he had been unable to write anything unpleasant, or do anything unpleasant!

One book you are currently reading:
Godless by Ann Coulter

One book you have been meaning to read:
The Christian Philosophyy of Thomas Aquinas Sounds promising!

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