Book Meme, Austen and Non-Austen editions

Busy and tired this week, as I try to finish and send off a couple of conference paper proposals for one conference and then write the 20-page conference paper for another (if I submit it by Sept. 25, it will be considered for publication). As I am lazy but still want to keep my blog fresh and interesting (for you! dear reader!), I am importing a book meme from a post in the wittily named book blog The Valve: A Literary Organ.

1. One book you have read more than once
Austen answer: I have read all the novels more than once. The novel I've likely read the most is Pride and Prejudice because I've taught it twice. What I've read only once are Austen's letters (though they are worth revisiting) and some of her juvenilia. Also, I must heathenly admit that I've read her prays only once.
Non-Austen answer: Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader.

2. One book you would want on a desert island
Austen answer: It always alternates between Emma and Pride and Prejudice. The pragmatist in me would go with Emma, which is about 50% longer, but the part of me that would need cheering up because I was on a desert island would go with the sparkling Pride and Prejudice.
Non-Austen answer: Cervantes' Don Quixote, because it's long and because I haven't read it yet.

3. One book that made you laugh
Austen answer: It's not a book, but the funniest work of Austen's I've ever read is a short piece written once Austen had started publishing. In "Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters", Austen combines all the suggestions of well-meaning family and friends into a hiliariously unrealistic story with a heroine so faultless that "Wherever she goes, somebody falls in love with her & she receives repeated offers of marriage". She is also "now and then starved to death" even though "Throughout the whole work, Heroine to be in the most elegant Society & living in high style".
Non-Austen answer: John Cleland's 18th century soft-core porn novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure for its absurd situations and the number and variety of euphemisms used to describe genitalia.

4. One book that made you cry
Austen answer: None have ever made me cry, but I do find Capt. Wentworth's letter to Anne Elliot in Persuasion very touching. You pierce my soul, indeed.
Non-Austen answer: During the last three decades of the 18th century in England, sentimental novels (tearjerkers) were very popular. I read some of them as part of my exams, and I have to admit that Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story did indeed elicit some tears—while I was in a coffee house, no less.

5. One book you wish you had written
Austen answer: All of them. D'uh. But if I had to pick one, I'd go with Emma. If I had to go with a critical work on Austen, then I'd pick Claudia L. Johnson's Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, an excellent feminist new-historicist work that's well written and still relevant today even though it was published in 1988.
Non-Austen: Zadie Smith's White Teeth. Tour de force storytelling, rewards readers who keep slogging. Also, she wrote it before she turned 25, increasing the envy factor.

6. One book you wish had never been written
Austen answer: Some of the Austen biographies are rather lacking, whether it be in research/sources (Valerie Grosvener Myer's Obstinate Heart) or in biographical objectivity (John Halperin's vitriolic biography). Also, Marilyn Butler's very important 1975 study Jane Austen and the War of Ideas is still the only academic book that I've ever thrown across a room, for a blatant misreading of a passage in Emma.
Non-Austen answer: There are many books that I didn't care for, but none that I can think of that I ever wished out of existence.

7. One book you are currently reading
Austen answer: Mansfield Park, on which I am currently writing a conference paper.
Non-Austen answer: Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. On deck: Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and, well, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (all 1500 pages), for chapter 1 of the dissertation.

8. One book you have been meaning to read
Austen: D.A. Miller's Jane Austen and the Secret of Style
Non-Austen: Of the long, long list (no one has to-read lists quite like English scholars), I would have to say Cervantes' Don Quixote. Unfortunately, it's not a book to be polished off over the weekend.

9. One book that changed your life
Austen: Pride and Prejudice, the first one I read, the one that got me hooked.
Non-Austen: I find it highly problematic now for its perpetuation of stereotypes, but Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club was a great discovery for the eighth-grade me. It blew my mind to read a grown-up novel about being Chinese in a white world and was an important moment of self-validation.

10. Now tag five people: Nope. But feel free to add your comments or import this meme into your own blogs.