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Book club 📖 If you were a book what book would you be and why?

C

christinejosephine

Cyburbian
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I like unrealistic conditional questions, I find them fun. Let's see, if I was a book I would be a book called "Three Existential Blind Mice", it is an illustrated short novel I wrote for my final project in art school. It is about three people from history, not all necessarily dead, who all suffer a grave humiliation at work, abandoned by their family, and end up blind and homeless in the street and die terrible suffering deaths that I tried to make funny. I basically started writing it when I was around 19 and on a diet of various hallucinagenics so you must forgive me. I am going to be 49 in two weeks so that was 30 years ago jeesh. I still have it, it's not a masterpiece it's kinda immature but I am proud that I did it, it took about two years of doodling.

Why? One of the characters is Jimmy Carter and he is falsely accused of having pornography mailed to him at his job as a Minister. He loses his job and subsequently blinds himself in a botched suicide attempt. He become a street minister and falls in front of a van full of drag queens on the way to a show they were doing at a local gay bar. There are photos of the drag queens trying to save Jimmy Carter in the local paper. I suppose I identify with Jimmy Carter doing nothing wrong, actually struggling to do right and failing. The other two mice are Andy Warhol and Madonna. You must forgive me I was an 80's child. If I wrote it as a novel today I would call it "Street Artists", and have Will Ferrell play Jimmy Carter in the movie.

Seriously though, I love the book "Jane Eyre" and why? would be I like the psychic elements in the story. CJ
 
Okay, I'll play.

I would be a pamphlet. Probably a slender few pages printed by the Federal Government on some mundane but pragmatic topic like "electricity in the home: what you can do to be safe". Why? Because it's like so many other things in my life where I'm compelled to play a serious role on a topic that I don't really have that much to say about.
 
An Oddly Modern Antiquarian Bookshop

I enjoyed the article below about an individualistic bookshop and you sound like you would find the book you described there.
I don't know if the link will transfer but if you google the title you can likely see the article if not in the New York Times someplace else. As sometimes the NYTs blocks their articles trying to get fees for the news paper. Although other sites also often carry the same article online for free.

An Oddly Modern Antiquarian Bookshop
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/...
A tiny shop in Toronto, specializing in the arcane and the absurd, may just be publishing’s great new hope.
 
I'd like to think that I'd be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig.

Why? Because much of what he had to say reflects the way I look at life. Examples:

“You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.”

or

“Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive”

or

“In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all. You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
 
Ofos I like that book too

I had a motorcycle several different times in my life. Not always mine but I would borrow one. I finally bought my own motorcycle in 1997? and sold it shortly after maybe a year because I started to think my luck might not last? plus I think at heart I wasn't willing to take it all the way, get the all weather clothing and ride it as my primary vehicle. Although I too love the altered state while driving a motorcycle.

I read and liked that book you mentioned by the way. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I personally like the element of motorcycle riding that you must look into the distance at where you want to go and than turn your hands without looking down at them. I love the brain part of driving a motorcycle. And this is an even more archaic association. I think motorcycle riding is a lot like fencing. I really got into fencing for a while and you must find your target with your mind and bring your hands up the same way.

i took the motorcycle safety class in new mexico years after i had learned to ride one and found it very helpful in a few tips especially about just putting one foot down when stopping; also wearing long sleeved clothing and as much protective clothing as possible. i always wore a helmet. This is a long story but in france there are only 10 states that accept USA drivers licences after you have a green card here. so i went to colorado and got a drivers licences before coming to france and had to give them my nm drivers licences and in the process of doing

my semi larcinous deed i got nervous and forgot about my motorcycle endorsement on the back of my drivers licences and so when i got to france i only had my regular drivers licences and so i have been kinda sorta forced in retirement; although i like riding a motorcycle and especially at night when the traffic is not so scary. and now i dont even have a usa drivers licence as it has expired and i wish i could find it because i could use it to get a new one in another state without having to take a test i will keep trying to look for it;

anyhoo, long way to say, i like that book too
 
ofos said:
I'd like to think that I'd be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig. ......
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I had a professor recommend I read that. I was too simple minded to understand the concepts. Probably didn't finish the book... :-s :s:
 
Just don't quote this info in my obit

I have a friend who is a retired famous sixties rock musician and he has been taking care of his elderly mom at home this last year and she recently died. And he and his three siblings wrote a really sweet obit about her life. One of the things in the obit was that as a teen she could hang from a trapeeze by her toes and she won the state typing championship amongst her being an advocate for early childhood education etc.

So, then the thought crossed my mind, if i die please don't include that at 19 I wrote Three Existential Blind Mice. Although, I wouldn't mind that they mentioned I could ride a motorcycle. Although this is not a book link per say, more how you creatively see yourself as an imaginary book or a book you like. Just to note I am reading a book I am finding surprisingly lightly funny called the "The Gernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society", about a book group started at a dinner over a countraband pig.

Today if I was a book, it might be a book about Urban Planning. One of those hopeless textbooks that cost 80 dollars in grad school and your sopposed to read about 100 pages but never do and if your dumb enough to buy it it does look smart on your book shelf collection afterall. I did save all my books from art school and planning school although i gave all my books from nursing school to an aunt who later dropped out of nursing school because it made her husband jealous.

so feeling like an urban planning textbook today that nobody reads but looks very formidable
 
The book we feel like can change from day to day its not like we are the same book our entire lives

I had a deep thought, that the book we feel like today is not the book we will feel like tomorrow.
 
christinejosephine said:
I had a deep thought, that the book we feel like today is not the book we will feel like tomorrow.
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Whooah, like that's deep!;)

Since we're permitted to be more than one book, I think today I'd like to be a well-thumbed copy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. I'd like to be that old but interesting friend that folks return to repeatedly years after having 'experienced' them the first time. Plus I'd be filled with descriptions of battles with mythical creatures, and how cool would that be? Also there's that whole 'deeper level' allegory thing that Tolkien himself vehemently denied, but seems to apply nonetheless. I like to communicate on multiple levels when possible.
 
The River Why

I would be The River Why. Because I am a river rat and the book is lyrical, irreverent and funny. I would want to be this book, despite the fact I am not a fisherman.
 
Tolkien reminds me of me ex-husband the giant rich-kid truest fund hippie-Sorry in advance

I met my former spouse (a dying home care patient whose daughter is on my facebook taught me to use the more polite term "former spouse" instead of ex-husband, former spouse sounds so nice, like an escort service where they don't have prostitutes and the only do "deep massage", to me former spouse and deep massage have a twang of the same connotation. Ahem, anyway, let's see, onward and upward onto higher conversational item. I met my former spouse while 23 and he was 25 both just out of liberal arts programs and sad about our job prospects. We teamed up and since his dumb sister Linda got through nursing school he was convinced that I could too. He took one class and the teacher chased him out for looking too handsome and rich. I guess only desperate looking women are allowed through nursing school. I fit the bill.

My ex-husband aka former spouse wanted me to read all of Tolkien the three books. I read the first 50 pages and was promised that there would be jumping and fighting and action after the first 50 pages; I tried to read the first 50 pages and got to like page 5 and started to really hate Tolkien. I started to hate him for his suffering at those all boys schools where they were tortured and raped and had to escape into a fantasy life in order to survive the humiliation and suffering. That is what I saw in the first 5 pages. I later read a bit about Tolkien that he would write cryptic ineligible stuff in weird un-understandable languages on the black board and nobody understood a thing but he gave everyone great marks so he was a popular teacher. I also later learned that he was great friend with CS Lewis another tortured child of those horrible pedophile magnets that Western males seem to have put a lot of elbow grease towards.

Anywayyy, let's see, so I tried to read Tolkien and admire it and believe that only the most spiritual and kind can really understand it. It is kinda like seeing the hologram in the Mona Lisa smile, if you can see the hologram in the original painting your so hooked you want to screw the painting. so my guess is that Tolkien is like the Mona Lisa smile you either get it or you dont. and obviously it is terribly popular and widely famous so a lot of people get Tolkien. Just NOT ME. I like Jane Eyre. I relate to the random cruelty and the not so random cruelty met out by people who are not supposed to do that like in Jane Eyre. Ah, what else, since I am on a bit of an automatic writing vibe. Er, Gosh, hope this is not all that weird but my underlying hope is that if I am so weird that all the weirdos will come a runnin and we can let our hair down. Oh, I know, so having the Tolkien experience when my second husband said could you iron my shirts like I like em, i was like well you have been single 7 years, you are good with your shirts; can you iron your shirts on sunday night yourself and i will eat yougart and go for a racewalk and not iron your shirts? like i normally do? so as a result we eat light on sunday nights and jc irons. and i still cant bear the pain past page 5 of Tolkien;

mean while still feeling like an overpriced Urban planning text book. looks good but not worth the money.
 
paperback, pages dog-eared, of Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino:

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.
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Love the Confederacy of Dunces

I have a big crush on Jeff Bridges and always thought he would have been a great Ignacious O'Reily. I love the opening scene were he is eating a dozen doughnuts and masturbating while petting his dog. I love the description of the doughnuts looking sorta violated. And how he called everything a giant abortion and just all sorts of fun details like that. I really enjoyed that book when I read it sorry to say too young for those sort of books these days. I also later read the first book he wrote as a teen called the Neon Bible during a trip to New York. It was interesting to read. Unfinished and I gave it to a woman I met on the bus and we gazed at the twin towers as a start point so i could know my way around. If I had lived in New York I would have stayed her friend. She offered to rent a room to me and I was flattered. She bought a house in Brookly and painted the entire place herself and had lost 40 pounds doing it and had removed all the old lead based paint. She was the proud owner of a Archie Bunker house in Brookly and offered me a cheap rental if I wanted to come to the city. So, I gave her my neon bible and told her about the book the Confederacy of Dunces. I still hope it gets made into a movie. I thought the Big Leibowski had Ingnacious elements.

So, yes, I would be Miss Trixie the partly mad office assistant at the factory that they fix up with lipstick right before the Ignacious provoked strike where he brought a suspiciously stained sheet that the marchers hold gingerly and away from themselves while Miss Trixie repeats that she is a beautiful women.
 
Glad to hear that I'm not the only nonTolkein fan. I'm a recovered sci-fi buff but never got into the whole sword/socery/grand quest thing. I would be The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Bumping around in an universe that wasn't supposed to make sense. While I would like to be Ford Prefect, I would probably be Dent, tho most people think I would be one of the Vogons.:r::not:
 
Now can I talk about the books I wish that I felt like

I always wanted to be a beautiful and intellectual book like "The Stranger", the gun was in my hand, the gun went off, the man was dead, something so simple. Yet, I must wave that freak flag. Brrr, cold outside today, drinking lemon tea. Need to stop being so weird and settle down.

CJ
 
christinejosephine said:
I love the opening scene were he is eating a dozen doughnuts and masturbating while petting his dog. I love the description of the doughnuts looking sorta violated.
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Well, actually he was thinking about his dog, Rex, who had died some time ago. I think my favorite part is the when he goes to the gay party to recruit his "army" and has all sorts of trouble.

It's simply amazing that the book came so close to never being published.
 
mastiff your right i thought about that later

i realized later that Ignacious was in reverie and the dog had actually passed away. I can't remember the exact description of the doughnuts but I thought it was funny as it sort of implied some sort of grotesque sex. Thats how my mind works anyway.

I read the book in 9th grade and found it hilarious and had a friend who recommended it to me and it sort of was our handbook amongst our friends. I don't know a lot about the author just what was written in book jackets but i understand he was gay and killed himself around 30 while alternatively living at his mother or in his car. I do understand that his mother somehow
pieced the book together and got it published somehow postheumously. sp sorry.

I loved when he was a hotdog vendor or when he escaped the weird chick myrna and how he sniffed her dirty braid. I have not read the book since 9th grade but it has played a big part in me and my friends imaginations of what humor was to us. I read the Neon Bible an unfinished book he wrote at 16 years old. It is a book about a boy who kills his mother. It is not very well developed but very interesting for a sixteen year old to write. I still cant get over that Ignacious would explain what an abortion when he found something bothersome. so bad.

I still believe Jeff Bridges would make a fabulous Ignacious. Do you think I should write him and suggest it? Just kidding.

CJ
 
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