[Note: Although it's a little confusing, I will alternately refer to the fabulous woman in my life as either "Aika" or "Aydika" depending on how I feel at any given moment. Her real name is "Aydika" (Japanese for "Village Flower by the Sea"), but nobody can pronounce it right, so she sometimes goes by "Aika." Today, I will use "Aydika." (for more information on this woman-human, see this post and this post)]
Aydika and I have a habit of burning long stretches of time talking about Everything. We'll start chatting at dinner time, and we'll finish our conversation when breakfast rolls around. When we go out for dinner, we close the restaurant, and we don't even realize it. It will just suddenly dawn on us that it's 2:00 AM, we've been sitting in the same seats for seven hours, and there are three very angry and sullen looking restaurant employees staring at us while tapping their feet.
In short, we talk a lot, and we talk about a lot.
A couple nights ago, we were talking about things we're afraid of.
Aydika asked me what I fear. I listed the usual things:
- Neurological trauma
- Dinoflagellates
- The sensation of orange juice between my fingers
- Oracle
- Hyperintelligent simians
- Ebola
- Radioactive mushrooms
- Etc...
The one that caught even me by surprise was this:
- The fear that I will one day run out of interesting authors to read
When I find an author I love, I'll read everything by that author, but I'll intentionally drag on the last book. I'm especially bad about this when I know that the author is dead. It's the knowledge that this author will never produce another work that causes me to slow myself down, savoring the last few bits I'll be able to extract from the author's gray matter by means of words on a page.
I've been through this with a few authors so far: Oscar Wilde, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Twain, John Wyndham, and many more.
I'm hitting a stage now where I feel like I'm about to run out of authors again.
Basically, I need an interesting book to read. I prefer to find a good author who has produced many works, but I'm perfectly satisfied to read the One Good Novel that someone was able to produce.
So, help me out here, eh?
What's the Best Damn Book you've ever read? And I don't mean technical books - tell me about those, too, but differentiate between technical/non-technical. I'm interested in the books that will cause me to look at the world a little differently, to be amused, to "get" why some people are the way they are, and so on. Fiction or non.
It's a tough question. It gets back to the idea of having to choose one of your children as your favorite.
But, that's part of the fun. The pressure of having to select one book from all that you've read as The Best is daunting. Of course, the choice you make isn't permanent - if you ask me this question twice a couple weeks apart, I'll probably give you a different answer each time, which is okay.
I'll kick it off.
The Best Damn Book that I've ever read was Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World. I've never read anything that changed so much of my universe in such a short amount of time.
What's the Best Damn Book you've ever read? Blog it, comment it, or just write it down on a napkin and hope that someone sees it...