Taken I think from here, but increasingly seen elsewhere.

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

I’m assuming that everyone else will have made sure most if the various classics survive in their own heads; so my choice is an unusual one, combining politics, history, art and culture with some beautiful – if completely wrong – prose: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia, first published in 1940. It’s massive in length; most of it broken up into short chapters about particular places – in the very first chapter, she writes of “the blue lake of Ochrid [ie Ohrid], the mosques of Sarajevo, the walled town of Korchula [ie Korcula]” which are three of my favourite places as well. She gives a typically witty warning about getting too involved with the subject (writing of the late nineteenth century):

English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.

And then of course she completely ignores her own advice, by adopting the Serbs and swallowing their side of the story without question – at one point she even refers to the Albanian population of Kosovo as “fellow Slavs”. But it’s a brilliant and memorable book, along with its flaws, which should not be lost, and which I would enjoy re-telling and discussing as we sat around the campfires.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

As a seven-year-old Enid Blyton reader I remember developing a fascination for Colin from the Secret Seven. Since puberty it’s tended to be female characters rather than male; most recently I think Phèdre from Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel trilogy.

Banner of Souls by , while wandering around New York and needing something to read over dinner.

The Snow Queen, by Joan D. Vinge.

Nearly finished:
Collision Course: NATO, Russia and Kosovo by my colleague John Norris.

Started:
Banner of Souls by
Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois
Brian W. Aldiss, by Michael R. Collings

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

This is very tricky. At the end of last year I did a couple of long posts on books to read in general and sf in particular. I read very fast, so considering I’ll have a lot of time, I’d need very long books, preferably ones that are difficult to get into. Using that criteria of course means that the list looks pretentious, but so be it.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce – read this once before, and really enjoying but not sufficiently engaging with the feed. But I don’t think even a desert island could drive me to tackle Finnegan’s Wake.
2. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust – in translation, though, since I’m not quite brave enough to try it in the original French. This is the only book on my list that I haven’t even opened as far as I can remember.
3. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon – as with Rebecca West, the history may be questionable but the prose is just fantastic. I’ve only ever had time to read excerpted highlights from it, and on a desert island I should be able to finish it.
4. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer – I would dare to try this in the original (provided there was a decent appendix); I’ve dipped into it in the past and enjoyed.
5. (inevitably) The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – weighty, bears re-reading, and would be light relief compared to the other four.