Another book meme

Mulier Fortis tagged me with yet another book meme.

1) Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?
Henry Nouwen - Once going to a retreat house I went to their book store and found books like Hitler's Pope,  Gary Wills stuff, a bunch of dissident garbage plus a lot of books by Henry Nouwen.  Sure it is irrational guilt by associations but there are lots of books to choose from.

2) If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?
Well the event would obviously be a world cruise since you then would get to spend the most time with them.   Just off the top of my head the characters would be Gandalf (great to have around for smoke rings),  the noble dark-elf ranger Drizzt Do'Urden,  and Chesterton's Innocent Smith.

3) (Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for a while, eventually you realise it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?
Well I have no idea what the most boring novel on the planet.  Such a novel wouldn't get much publicity if it was truly boring.  Even badly written and poorly researched novels like The Da Vinci Code don't commit the sin of being boring.  Now if you have a category of books that would be quite purgatorial than I think it could be any of Fr. Andrew Greeley's bodice ripper novels.

4) Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?
I never pretend to read something.

5) You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Advisor to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (If you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead and personalise the VIP).
Orthodoxy, if he doesn't like it I probably would not have wanted to work for him anyway.

6) A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?
Too obvious - Latin.  Then I could start a new blog with one of those cool Latin names.

7) A mischievous fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?
Well I don't know exactly why such a fairy would be labeled mischievous?  If a book isn't worth reading yearly it probably is not a good book. There are already several books that I read yearly.  Orthodoxy, Everlasting Man, Theology and Sanity, The Hobbit and the LOTR series. Than there are other books that I seem to have on two or three year cycles.

8) I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?
One thing I love about St. Blogs is that book recommendations from various bloggers has opened me up to multiple books that I would probably never have read.  For some dumb reason I had the idea that Dean Koontz was a second-rate Stephen King till I heard such good things about the Brother Odd series and his other books; boy was I wrong.  From fiction to theology I have been introduced to a bunch of great books.

9) That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leather bound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.
Well I would like to have a room with a dedicated library with walls of shelves with leather bound books instead of having satellite libraries all over the house.  Though a dream library would also have one of those big Print-On-Demand machines so I could dial up any book I wanted.  I would really like the library to have a secret passage and when you grab the right book opens up to another library!