This is one of those posts where a blogger answers some questions and then passes the questions on to other bloggers. It helps bloggers connect and discover each other. This one is called “Get To Know Ya Book Tag”, and it’s about different books that a blogger liked, disliked or was somehow influenced by. Thank youย Brittany for tagging me!
Here are my answers.
1. Favourite Book of All Time
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
I havenโt yet met a book more alive and real than this one. I envy anybody who hasnโt read it yet. Here’s my review of A Moveable Feast.
2. Favourite Book Five Years Ago
Five years ago I was still very much into popular psychology, especially the books that looked into personality disorders. What a fascinating topic! It’s hard to name one book, there were so many of them.ย Who’s Pulling Your Strings? for example, is very good. It discusses a wide range of arsenal a manipulator uses. I think all people could benefit from reading it.
3. Favourite Duology/Trilogy/Series
I havenโt read series since childhood. Back then I loved Dumas’ books but Iโm not sure Iโd like them as much now.
Speaking of Dumas, I’ll remind you that his works are in public domain now, as many other books that were published a long time ago. In most countries books become public domain on the 1st January, 70 years after the death of the author. In the US any book written prior to 1923 is in public domain. It means that you can find Dumas and many other authors onย Project Gutenberg site. It’s not pirating, it’s absolutely legal.
4. Last book You Read
This will sound awesome, check it out: the last book I read was The Last!
I wrote about this book in my October roundup post. I will post my review of it later later.
5. Last Book of Poetry Iโve Read
I haven’t read poetry for years. In my defence I can say that I know almost all of Anna Akhmatova by heart (original, not translated).
6. What Book most influenced your life
From the most recent ones I would nameย Miss Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Stefanovic. I loved the book so much I had to share the love, so I started my book blog!ย 
ย The review of Miss Ex-Yugoslavia became the first post on my blog.
7. Book That Made You Ugly Cry
Flowers for Algernonย by Daniel Keyes. It’s a masterpiece that brings on incomparable grief.
8. Book That Made You Laugh
The non-fiction What if?ย Whenever I need a laugh I just open a random page of it and laugh.
9. Character Youโd Like to Be For A Day
Poirot, or Holmes, or Miss Marple. They all seem to have exciting lives.
10. Book You DNFed
Washington Blackย by Esi Edugyan. I couldn’t finish it. I’m still surprised how something so full of adventures can turn out to be so boring.
11. What Book are You Excited to Read
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Everybody calls it an amazing novel but I have never read it!
Here are the bloggers that I love talking to and I’m tagging them for the post:
- Sarah’s blog
- CJ’s blog
- Claudia’s blog
- Stephen’s blog
- Norrie’s blog
- Herding Cats blog
- Babbage and Sweetcorn blog
- NS Ford blog
- Ova’s blog
- Umut’s blog
- Evelina’s blog
Dear tagged bloggers, there’s no pressure to take part in this book tag, but if you do post your answers let me know, so I can read them.
Thank you for the nomination! This looks like an interesting tag, so I hope to get to it quite soon ๐
And yes, it would be really cool to be either Poirot or Miss Marple!
Hi Stephen, I hope you’ll have fun making the post. I initially thought it would be easy but it took me several hours to think of the right books. Also, I forgot one question: the book so good that you dreamed about it. I think it was something like Freudian forgetfulness ๐ I didn’t have the answer and then I truly accidentally forgot to insert it into the text. I’ll be looking forward to learn your list of books and what character you would be. ๐
Thank you! In my experience tags can often be the posts that take the longest to write ๐
I’m not that experienced yet. Next time I’ll set aside more time ๐
Thank you so much for tagging me, Alexandra – what a lovely set of questions! I’ll try to get them done with week, or I know it will stack up and I love the sound of these ones…
You are welcome Sarah. I also found these questions a good idea for a book post. I realised I missed one question. It was about the book so good you dreamed about it ๐ But truth be told I don’t know such book. I’ll be looking forward to your post ๐
Ooo… I dream about books from time to time – I certainly dreamt about Strange the Dreamer and Jean Lee’s Fallen Princeborn: Stolen. And of course I dream about my own books a lot when I’m writing them…
I’ve never heard about these books. I need to look them up! I did dream about The Last but I don’t know if it’s because the book was so good.
I tend to dream rather vividly anyway – and I always read just before I go to sleep, so I suppose it isn’t a surprise that I dream of books… I assume it’s because of the quality of the books, because I never dream about mediocre books.
That’s interesting. I guess you don’t read scary books before bed then? ๐
No! I don’t read scary books at all…:)
I thought Sci-Fi can be scary sometimes. I remember one Stephen King’s story that was SF but was very scary ๐
I avoid those ones, too! I don’t mind stuff if it’s a little dark – but I won’t read horror – I am SUCH a wuss!
I’m probably easily scared too. I just haven’t yet read something so scary that I would quit reading such things altogether. What sci-fi book would you recommend to a person who doesn’t normally read sci-fi and who’s very into good writing, first of all? ๐
Becky Chambers The long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a lovely introduction to entertaining space opera. Doomsday is a wonderful time travel adventure by Connie Willis and Speed of Dark is a wonderful, thought provoking read by Elizabeth Moon…
Thank you very much! I downloaded samples of all of them. They all sound interesting. I think I will try Speed of Dark first, I like thought provoking ๐
You’re welcome – I hope you enjoy them. Science fiction is often regarded as either very male-orientated or poorly written nonsense. And the best of it is brilliant, profound and thought provoking. Though I’m biased!
“poorly written nonsense” – THAT is my strongest fear! I’m all in for “make-orientated”. I find many “female-orientated” books are not interesting for me. I used to read Soviet sci-fi when I was a teen, but I think it’s different, philosophic maybe, but also in a very …soviet (?) way. I’m anyway not an expert now, I read it such a long time ago.
I wouldn’t recommend any of that:)).
I know ๐ That’s why I asked you.
Awesome answers! Im currently reading flowers for Algernon and it’s good to hear it’s good. Really like it so far as well
What a coincidence! It’s a true work of art. Will you write about the book later?
I think so! ๐
I’ll be looking forward to it, then.
Thanks for the tag!
Poirot is such a cool character. Don’t know if i could be him tho. He’s always in pain because of his fancy shoes, and worries about his moustache a lot ๐
My please โบ๏ธI didn’t remember this about Poirot! My new running shoes are way to small, I’ll be a lot like Poirot these days, apparently. Who would you want to be?
Oh no! Small shoes are no bueno!
From book characters, hmm, not so sure. But I’d swap with most characters from Star Trek Next Generation for a day ๐
Shame on me! I didn’t even know those were originally books!
I think they wrote the books based on the series ๐
Hahaha, I’m hopeless ๐
Thanks for participating! Great answers! That is a great note about books becoming public domain! You can get a lot of the public domain books free for Kindle too. And I have an app that is just called “Audiobooks HQ — audio books” created by Inkstone Software. Its a free app and there are a ton of free audio books. The free ones are all books that are in the public domain, so they are older, but they are free still ๐
Also Pride and Prejudice was written in 1813 ๐
Hi! Thanks for stopping by! I think the free audiobooks probably come from this site? https://librivox.org/ Older books are often so much better than modern books. There are exceptions to both but older definitely doesn’t mean worse. Yes, exactly I know this about Pride and Prejudice. I think when the time comes I’ll try to find it on some public domain source.
The app has a section for free audiobooks and a section for ones you can buy, but the free ones are all Librivox recordings!
Oh boy, it’s been years since I read Flowers for Algernon. I cried like a baby.
I also enjoyed Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I tried reading more of his work this year, but was sorely disappointed. Am going to try The Sun Also Rises next year, which many say was his best novel.
Thanks for the recommendation of What If…? It sounds like a great book to have when you need a laugh.
Hi there! Flowers for Algernon is absolutely heartbreaking, but not in a melodramatic way. What a book …
As for Hemingway. I read some of his stories BEFORE A Moveable Feast so I was saved from disappointment. I do think this is his best work, so everything else feels worse. But if I had to arrange his books in order I liked them, there would be his short stories on the second place. Also, The Old Man And The Sea comes very close to the level of honesty in A Moveable Feast but to get it completely, I think one should first read a bit about the background for the story. It’s a tricky task to do, if you don’t want to spoil the story for yourself, but the story get a totally new angle once you know what had been happening before he wrote it. In short, The Old Man And The Sea is not only an actual story about a fisherman, it’s also a metaphor about Hemingway himself at that moment of his life. Knowing that, I loved that book really very much. All his other novels are of course good, but nothing touched me that much.
What if…? is hilarious! It’s really worth reading.