Day Three of the Book Challenge. You sick of this yet? I’m not. But I think I will be, quite soon.
Seven: Book You Can Quote/Recite
Recitation. Quotation. I actually have great difficulty remembering exact words if they aren’t sung, so rarely do I quote books perfectly. There’s usually some mess ups here and there.
I’m most proud of the fact that I can quote part of Inferno (in Italian) and I know what it means. Continuing on the Dante kick, I would love to be able to quote one of the poems out of La Vita Nuova.
Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare
la donna mia, quand’ella altrui saluta,
ch’ogne lingua deven tremando muta,
e li occhi no l’ardiscon di guardare.
Ella si va, sentendosi laudare,
benignamente d’umiltà vestuta;
e par che sia una cosa venuta
da cielo in terra a miracol mostrare.
Mostrasi sì piacente a chi la mira,
che dà per li occhi una dolcezza al core,
che ‘ntender no la può chi non la prova:
e par che de la sua labbia si mova
un spirito soave pien d’amore,
che va dicendo a l’anima: ‘Sospira!’
I love that poem. I really, truly do.
Eight: Book that Scares You
By and large, I don’t read books that are scary. I’m more likely to watch scary movies than read horror books.
But you know what does scare me? Diseases. Real world stuff. So, book that scared me? My textbook for my Emerging Infectious Diseases class.
My friends and I would read the book, and end up diagnosing ourselves. Never wise. Also, in Boston you are highly unlikely to get any of the exotic diseases found in Africa.
Nine: Book that Makes You Sick
No book has made me physically ill, I’m proud to say. But there are some where the descriptions have moved me to grimace (I’d love to watch my face as I read. I’ve noticed that I make some really funny feeling expressions if I get really into a book).
Sick with dread, perhaps.
I recently finished Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. I read it following a biography on the man, which made following it easier. But there was also a sense of dread. I knew about some of the more terrible instances in the book because the bio addressed them, in some cases I had even read these sections, as Korda felt Lawrence’s words were better than his for certain situations, particularly Lawrence’s abuse at the hands of the Turks in Deraa.
Reading the Deraa section, indeed, knowing it was coming, put my stomach in knots. It didn’t make things any better when I got to that part.
On a more humorous note, reading about sheep-pyramid feasts didn’t help the hunger level. Ugh…
Ned Wolfe 