So, Samantha tagged me. Here we go.
You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
I will make the odd choice: the Larousse Gastronomique. Because choosing between Lewis, O'Connor, Chesterton, and Dostoevsky is hard. And anyway, the Larousse is an incredible encyclopaedia of food.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Someone else's character? No. One in my own writing? Yes. But I think my fictional characters, at least in college, were me working out secret crushes while protecting my wallflowerness from actually having to act on them.
The last book you bought is:
Fiction: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. And I will eventually finish it, if I can just get over the fact that I think I know how it's going to end.
Nonfiction: Baseball Prospectus 2005. Yeah, like that's a surprise.
The last book you read:
The Zen of CSS Design : Visual Enlightenment for the Web by Shea and Holzschlag. Reading for work, again. I have a problem with books on CSS -- they're very repetitive. It's good that web writers have finally stopped spending half of a book justifying CSS. Now, though, I wish they'd take that half a book and use it to discuss what good web design is and how CSS helps a web geek build well-designed sites. The CSS gurus elide the fundamental questions of good design in the name of showing off some feature that only works in one "standards-compliant" browser running on one computer (and, of course, fail to explain why that feature is anything other than pointless eye candy.) It took a couple of years before the gurus admitted that the "compliant" box model wasn't as logical as the "non-compliant" IE box model. Maybe in another year or two they can lay aside the "coolness" and get to the "usefulness."
What are you currently reading?
Nothing, having just finished Zen of CSS. I think next up is re-starting The Pickwick Papers.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:
I'm going to claim the Desert Island Discs exemption and assume I get the Bible and the complete Shakespeare.
Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A Russian novel full of odd, mystical tangents, tangled plots, and characters that walk off never to be seen again. In essence, a perfect desert island book.
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. Sharp, grotesque, and beautiful. Only a Catholic could write a satire of the Protestant South and its encounter with modern commercialism.
Good Omens by Gaiman and Prachett. The funniest book about the End Times, ever. I wonder if the Left Behind guys would have still written their craptacular series if they'd read this book first.
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Only here because there is no single complete volume of the poetry of R.S. Thomas... yet. But this is still a great book, one that encapsulates the taming of the American West and the darkness of emotional adultery.
Total Baseball by Thorn and Palmer. Because, well, you know me. :)
Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
Well, Susan's done hers. So, I'll tag...
George
The Rev. Hasty
and because she'll never do it, Kat.
Comments
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What CSS book would you recommend?
I've picked up bits and pieces just looking at people's code, playing with options in DW and hacking apart templates.
With everything moving that direction, it's time to get off my butt and really learn it from the ground up..Posted by: Zygote | April 10, 2005 05:41 PM
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ummmm, why don't you think that I would answer these?
Posted by: kat | April 10, 2005 08:46 PM
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Hmm... will try to think this through... though I've never been one for these type of survey chains.
Posted by: George Chang | April 12, 2005 02:34 PM
