My German is strictly on the Hogan’s Heroes TV level (achtung! verboten! schnell!) but I have friends who tell me it’s a really difficult language to speak correctly even for native speakers. 

What most people find off putting abut Russian is of course the Cyrillic alphabet but really ** you do not have permission to see this link **!  

There are lots of levels of proficiency between total incompetence and complete fluency.  And being able to read and speak are two different skills.  I can read French very well but conversationally I am hopeless.  

Everything gets more difficult as we get older.  Learning a new language is good brain exercise.   I would love to learn a non-western language.  Chinese or Japanese.   But I would also like to have a serious go at learning koine so I could read Mark.  My friend Priscah who was born and raised in Namibia (and who speaks –gulp– nine languages) wants me to learn an African language.  Realistically I can’t do all of that.  Decisions decisions.  

1. What was the first book you remember?

What else?  The KJV.  I was born and raised in one of those cultural bubbles that seemed so absolute from the inside but was vanishing even then.  (Now even the conservative evangelicals don’t read the KJV anymore. The most commonly used translation is the execrable ** you do not have permission to see this link **.)  I was read the KJV, learned to read by reading it, and read it to others (like my illiterate grandmother).  This stood me in good stead during school days.  I never had any trouble with all those old traditional English authors because I had already imbibed the sonorous prose and rhythms of the KJV.       

2. What was the first book you bought for yourself?

I started reading so early that I don’t really remember the actual “first” but it could have been Poe or H G Wells or Arthur Conan Doyle or Mark Twain which were all huge discoveries for me.  It was probably some lost book I can’t even remember that caught my imagination.  (One thing I really regret because of my fundamentalist background, is that I didn’t read any of the classic “children’s” books while I was actually a child.  I’m a huge fan of the Oz books but only read them in my 20s.)  

3. What was a book you thought of as a discovery that nobody else seemed to know about?

At some point I became a devoted fan of Medieval Chinese T’ang Dynasty (618-907 CE) art and poetry.  Go ** you do not have permission to see this link ** which combined two interests, Chinese poetry and ancient cosmology.  These books are a case where scholarly literature transcends specialty and itself becomes literature.  Sinologists will have heard of Shafer of course but these books deserve a wider audience for no other reason than they’re beautiful.

4. Name a book that changed you.  

** you do not have permission to see this link **.  In one of those moments of maximum imprint vulnerability Ms. Chopin taught me that women are a locus of thoughts and needs and desires apart from traditional social roles, not by producing a dreary feminist tract, but by evoking a 19th century society in Southern Louisiana and a woman who can find no place in it.  (Perhaps an underwhelming revelation to some in this cynical and swinish age but I note how many American males never receive it!)  Chopin is one of those 19th century American authors who needs to be better known.  She’s as close as we’ve ever come to a home-grown Colette.      

5. Name a book recommended by a friend that turned out to be really good.

** you do not have permission to see this link ** by Alan Garner.  Literate friends are pearls of great price.

6. Name the weirdest book you’ve ever read.

** you do not have permission to see this link ** by David Lindsay.  Even after all these years I would be hard pressed to describe what it’s about.  A man travels to another planet to find…what?  Himself?  A gnostic phantasmagoria?  An allegorical hash dream?   Gender bending (with invented pronouns!) occult psychedelia?  (Written in 1920!)  Like Strange Wine you must sample it for yourself.  With a work this unique any response is valid.   (If you are tantalized and want to have a go make sure you find the recent Penguin Science Fiction series edition.  This book is now in the public domain and there are oodles of editions.  The Penguin edition is the only original corrected text available.)

7. Name a classic work that everyone tells you is a work of genius that you utterly detest.

I have preferences but I can’t say I really detest anything.  I have had occasion to run afoul of the Jane Austen cult.   A case where enjoyment of the Master’s work is compromised by the Disciples.  But the world is wide and I always preferred ** you do not have permission to see this link ** anyway.   

8. What is the book you own that you treasure most?

With a few exceptions I tend to be a fan of individual works rather than of an author’s entire oeuvre.  One of my favorites, a true desert island volume, is ** you do not have permission to see this link **.  After reading a couple pages you’ll know immediately if you wish to travel further.)  

Sorry, I do have a point here.  Many years ago now I attended an estate sale always on the lookout for what may come although I had limited resources. Doesn’t cost anything to look right?  I was glancing at a shelf of older books about to abandon the search when I saw Lord Dunsany’s name on the spine of one slim volume.  As I said Dunsany was very prolific – I think he wrote something like 90 books – and I had seen other editions of some of these works before.  Nice to hold and to thumb through but always out of my range of either price or interest.  Friends, my neck still aches in the winter from the double-take I did when I saw the title page.  Yep you guessed, Fifty-One Tales!  And not only that.  A First edition from 1915.  A book published when Dunsany was at the height of his powers.  A book he might have held in his own hands.  (If you don’t feel that kind of connection useless to try to explain it.) 

Very cool!  So let’s look at the slip-card shall we and see how much I won’t be able to pay for it. Well I saw a “1” and a “5”.  Ok $150.  I would have thought it might be worth more but it was pretty obscure after all.  But wait.  That was definitely a dollar sign but I actually only saw a “1” and  “5”.  $15?  No way.  (Perhaps in these environs printing the zeroes would have been considered vulgar.)  Nothing ventured, etc so I took the book up to the desk where the gentleman overseeing the sale sat, clearly bored out of his mind.  When I asked him to confirm the price, he said, yes, that is indeed $15. A First edition? 1915?  Yes, $15.  The guy was clearly anxious for the sale to be over and to be anywhere but where he was on a Sunday afternoon, so having demonstrated due diligence, my conscience clear, I plunked down the fifteen bucks American, and escaped with my prize.  So the universe rewards those who are pure in heart.    

The last time I bothered to do the research I saw a similar volume listed at $750 though who knows if I could actually get that for it.  It’s monetary value is completely irrelevant.  I will never willingly part with it though of course one day it will part from me with little enough commotion.