Book Meme

Thanks for the tag, Marmee. Her post is here. I enjoyed reading others' answers to this meme--and I think I was tagged before but never got to it. So I will give it a whirl:

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why?
I will buy a hardcover if it's an author I love or a book I just have to read and I just can't wait for the paperback or the other 42 requests in front of mine at the library. Some books I really just want to own. I often buy remaindered hardcovers when I find them. Some books I have bought full price in hardcover are A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia (I was at her reading), The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (I got about halfway through this book in Spanish and gave up, then went to his reading of the English translation and gratefully finished it in English), and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (for our book club). I am about to RUN out and buy Ann Patchett's Run in hardcover. Other than that, I buy paperback.

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
Bluestockings. A writer I know has a column of that name, but I don't think she'd mind.

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." (Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen)

4. The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be ….
Although I would have answered differently at different times in my life (as a child, E. L. Konigsburg; in college, Emily Dickinson or Virginia Woolf), right now I would choose Irene Nemirovsky, author of the incomplete Suite Francaise. I would make it a long lunch, and bring my laptop, so she could write the remaining three sections.

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…
Remembrance of Things Past (or, In Search of of Lost Time, an alternate translation) by Marcel Proust. I have never read it and finally I would have the time.

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that….
is a kind of helmet with attached headlight and reading glasses that would stay in place even when I read lying down on my side. I can manage to hold the book up myself, but those darn reading glasses! I have just recently graduated (?) to reading glasses and find it impossible to wear them and read lying down, which is truly the most comfortable way to read.

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of….
The hours of my life I have spent in used bookshops. And this reminds me of a show a few years ago at Adobe Book Shop on 16th Street in San Francisco, where an artist named Chris Cobb rearranged all the books in the store by color, rather than by subject. He and volunteers spent hours beforehand putting little slips in each book so that afterward, they could spend more hours putting all the books back where they belonged. It was an extraordinarily beautiful, and made for some odd and inspired juxtapositions of titles. NPR did a feature on it.

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be….
Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables.

9. The most overestimated book of all times is….
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. It is supposed to be inspiring, and is so to many people, but I didn't find inspiration there.

10. I hate it when a book….
ends.

I tag anyone reading this who would like to play. Post a comment with a link to your post if you do.