This morning was marked by construction on a loudly adjacent street, a constant window-juddering for hours from which I finally managed to fall asleep just in time to wake up for my doctor's apppointment. The amount of sleep on which I have run this last week is not sufficient to sustain intelligence. This meme I stole from
foxmoth might still have required thought to complete: the seven deadly sins of reading.
1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.None at the moment, but the mysterious attractiveness of cover art has in the past memorably led me to check out P. C. Hodgell's
God Stalk (1982), Larry Niven's
The Integral Trees (1984), and Tanith Lee's
The Book of the Damned (1988).
2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.In terms of personal time put in, Alasdair Gray's
Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Robert Serber's
The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (1992), and Yiannis (Anastasios Ioannis) Metaxas'
Μετά όμως, μετά . . . (2017).
3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.I don't even keep track! Elizabeth Goudge's
The Valley of Song (1951), Mary Renault's
The Mask of Apollo (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin's
The Complete Orsinia (2016).
4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.I don't keep a to-read list. I have failed to get around to whole chunks of the Western canon in English.
5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.Not counting books that had to be re-bought specifically because their original editions were perishing through use, Mikhail Bulgakov's
The Master and Margarita (1967), Patricia A. McKillip's
Riddle-Master (1976–79), and Mervyn Peake's
Gormenghast (1946–59).
6. Wrath, books I despised.Books I disliked seem to slip from my mind more easily than the other kind, but I bounced definitely off Josephine Tey's
The Franchise Affair (1948), Alan Moore's
Watchmen (1987), and A. S. Byatt's
The Children's Book (2009).
7. Envy, books I want to live in.I do not want to live in most of the books I read for a variety of reasons, but from elementary through high school the answer would have been hands-down, one-way, Anne McCaffrey's Pern. These days I would take a study abroad in Greer Gilman's Cloud. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain remains the site of my sole official, never-written self-insert.
Appropriately enough to wind up a book meme, I have just been given two poetry collections in modern Greek by the friend of the family who has the olive groves outside Sparti. I remain amateur in the language and the Nikos Kavvadias looks incredibly maritime.