Thursday, January 29, 2009

the most

Hi, Readers! Today I have a few questions for you. You can respond as a comment, on your own blog, just think about your responses, or talk about them to a friend ... whatever. Here are the things to think about:

1. What book have you read the most times in your life? Excluding books of scripture and picture books. (I've read Peek-a-Who? So many times!)

2. What movie/tv episode/whatever as long as it's a video of some sort have you seen the most times? Scooby Doo doesn't count, you only think you've seen the same episode many times.

3. What person do you talk to the most? We'll focus on people who actually talk back, so yelling at the tv doesn't count.

Here are my answers:

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I suspect this is an answer that many others will have also. It's pretty much the perfect book. I have large passages memorized. When I was a kid, I read The Secret Garden over and over. This happened for 2 reasons -- I liked it, and I owned it. We didn't own that many kid books. We didn't have to, because of the public library! So when I ran out of reading material, there were only a few choices and The Secret Garden was usually mine.

2. OK, so I don't own a tv and haven't ever in my adult life. So this one's a little hard. We have a DVD player now, but I don't watch that much ... so the answer ends up being stuff I saw as a kid. Maybe The Philadephia Story? It's a good one and was my big sister's favorite. Again, I have large pieces memorized. Or a Christmas favorite like Holiday Inn.

3. The person I talk to the most has to be ... my 3-year-old V! She's the one at home with me the most, except for E, who is difficult to converse with. We coo a lot to each other, but that's about it. But I seriously think I talk to my kids more than my husband, just because I see them for more hours. Nathan definitely wins if we're talking about adults.

2 comments:

Susan said...

My answers:
1. Pride and Prejudice, although I love Jane Austen's Emma too and have reread all the Georgette Heyers so many times that the ones I haven't replaced with newer editions are held together with rubber bands.
2. In the past few years, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Sorry but those kids are so cute. Over a whole lifetime, Holiday Inn would probably win. Can you beat Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas" and Fred Astaire? I think not. You're right about Scooby Doo. How did they get away with using the same plot every week? I am still in awe.
3. My husband. Who else can I talk to? Coming in second place would be... my son Z! Believe that? He calls often and I love it.

Michael said...

Answers:
1. There are several fiction books and authors I have read and reread multiple times. Mid- to late-career Dick Francis novels to be sure -- I would read one and immediately reread it to figure out how he maintained suspense. Then do the same thing the next year. There are several others, including Pride and Prejudice.

But then there are books you need to read only once that stay with you in vivid detail and keep coming back to you, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Don Quixote or Grass Soup. You kind of reread them by re-experiencing them.

If we count poetry, late trends are Billy Collins and Mary Oliver. Lifetime trend? Flatter me and choose a big name, but the answer would probably be somebody like Ogden Nash or don marquis. Gotta have comic relief.

2. The movie Cars. I know, I know...who's surprised? The long term answer is probably one of the B&W classic movies from the '30s or '40s, maybe It Happened One Night or Bachelor Mother. If we had DVDs of them, my answer would soon be the Our Gang/Little Rascals episodes. Our neighborhood gang growing up was a less colorful, if more tuneful, version of them, with the littlest neighbor kids (and Katie) being the comic relief.

3. I would hope my wife, but it is probably someone at work. I spend lots more of my time at work emailing than talking these days, but the answer is likely still to be my employees. I have twelve direct reports, six of them very new, so there is lots of teaching going on. And a few of them are good comic relief.