Book Meme tag time

A fellow blogger (aka my boo) sent me a "tag" where I'm supposed to follow up on a thread about important books in my life so I figured that I dig through my brain and shelves to see what I'd come up with.

A book that changed my life:
William S. Burrough's The Naked Lunch: Nothing I'd read by high school prepared me for this and after it, my reading experience was never quite the same. For me, it was an amazing primer for what could be done in realm of writing. Favorite passage: a computer shorts out and accidentally lets loose all the loonies on the world, told in deliciously grizzly detail.

A book I've read more than once:
Amos Vogel's Film As A Subversive Art: It's a bit out of date now but it's still an interesting look at the taboos of cinema. Decades after its publication, few of them have been broken (no surprise there), which says a lot about our society.

A book I would take with me if I were stuck on a desert island:
James Joyce's Finnegans Wake- It's actually several novels in one and only being secluded like this would afford you the time really needed to parse some different meanings from the book

A book that made me laugh:
Any collection of plays by Eugene Ionesco: no one chronicled the absurd better than he did (except maybe Beckett or Dylan). Even more than "Rhinoceros," I love "The Bald Soprano."

A book that made me cry:
Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol: especially the ending where Scrooge gets reformed.

A book I wish had been written:
Write Around the World: An Anthology of Music Journalism from the Four Corners of the Earth: This is something that I'm working on now, specifically focusing on writers not in the U.S. or the UK and I've already found a lot of fascinating material. I just need to find an enlightened publisher...

A book I wish had never been written:
Anything by Michael Savage or Ann Coulter. I guarantee that history will not be kind to them.

A book I've been meaning to read:
The Bible: probably the most used and abused book in history, I've glanced through passages before but it would be interesting to go cover-to-cover to see what's really said and think about what it's really supposed to mean. For the same reasons, I'd want to read the Koran too.

I'm currently reading:
Among other things... Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Bill C. Malone's Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class and Adam Cussow's Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition

An added category:
A book that I wish I had written:
Christian Bok's Eunoia: A brilliantly maddening prose book where each chapter consists only of words which all use the same vowel. Favorite: Chapter A, which is decided to Hans Arp (get it?)


And to carry on with the tag tradition, I'm passing this along to five other bloggers:

• Brooklyn Vegan
  
• George Light
• Ann Powers
• Simon Reynolds
• Carl Wilson

Even if they don't have time to respond, they have good sites you should check out.

Also, if you out there in blog-land have some favorites, feel free to share them in the comment section here.