Oh dear, I feel like the White Rabbit, rushing along looking at his watch and fretting at how late he is. I’m very late. But that’s because I didn’t know. I wasn’t told. No one told me. I only found out by accident, dropping in for a read of Eric the Unred. He’s got this Book Meme thing going, and he said he was going to pass the stick to three people, and one of them was My Humble Self. Is my face red. He passed me this stick and I promptly dropped it and went downtown to hang around the pool hall and frighten people. That’s not co-operative.

Right then.

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

Hamlet. Hey, I’ll do you a two-for-one special – I’ll throw in Lear. And some sonnets. Such a deal.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Besides Hamlet, you mean? No.

The last book you bought is:

Oh right like I can afford to buy books.

The last book you read:

Err – all the way through, you mean? Gee, I don’t know – it was so many decades ago.

What are you currently reading?

Oh, gawd – it would be quicker to list what I’m not reading. Well, Richard Wolin’s The Seduction of Unreason, Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Janet Radcliffe Richards’ Human Nature After Darwin, Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, several Rorty books, Hitchens’ Why Orwell Matters, Norman Levitt’s Prometheus Bedeviled – among other things. I, uh, don’t read books all the way through – oh wait, you already know that, I told you all about it last month in that thing about reading sideways. I admitted it all. I read two pages of lots and lots of books, then throw them aside and go down to the poolhall. You understand.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

All of Jane Austen’s novels in one volume. Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin in one volume. (I am not cheating. Be quiet.) A fat anthology of English poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries. Anna Karenina. The Red and the Black.

I’m going to skip the one about passing the stick to other people, because Eric says this thing has been going around and probably everyone has already done it by now while I wasn’t paying attention and I don’t have time to look first to see who hasn’t and besides I’m shy.

Update. I changed my mind. I knew this would happen. Replace Anna K with the largest possible one-volume collection of Hazlitt’s essays (far larger than any that actually exists – it will have to be made specially). Replace Red and Black with ‘The Prelude.’