Books, Books, Books

Okay, Dean Esmay laid this one on me; here are my answers to the questions:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, by Walker Percy.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Ummm, do comic books count? 'Cause I had a major crush on Crystal, the Human Torch's girlfriend, in Fantastic Four comics way back in the Lee/Kirby days of the 1960s.

The last book you bought is:

Access to the Airwaves: My Fight for Free Radio, the autobiography of one-time shortwave radio pirate Allan Weiner, who currently is head honcho at shortwave station WBCQ, Monticello, Maine.

The last book you read is:

Konrad Bizer: A Man Called by the Lord, by Paul Jordan. The biography of one of my predecessors in the pulpit here at St. John's. Bizer, born in Germany and educated in Switzerland, served as pastor here in this corner of Iowa from 1903 to 1924.

What are you currently reading?

The Complete Card Player, by Albert Ostrow (1945). This is one of the few older books on rules of card games that doesn't have the name "Hoyle" in its title. I'm rereading it for probably about the tenth time in the past 35 or 40 years, longtime game fanatic that I am.

Five books you would take to a desert island.

Dean says he'll give me a free Bible for the desert island: fine with me, dude, long as it's the Oxford Annotated <old> Revised Standard Version, with the Apocrypha.

My other five books would be: Boswell's Life of Johnson, the Everyman's Library cloth edition; The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, in Floyd Dell & Paul Jordan-Smith's 1927 hardcover edition; the Essays of Montaigne, the 1947 Heritage Press edition of the George B. Ives translation; Walden by Henry David Thoreau, preferably the Könemann hardcover edition; and On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Dowingba, because.

Casey Tompkins, because because.

IB Bill, because because because.