Susan at ReadingWritingLiving tagged me for the Bookish Meme!  So here goes…

1.Hardcover or paperback, and why?

Paperback, specifically trade paperback, b/c they’re more portable than hardcovers but have more satisfying heft than mass-market paperbacks.

2.If I were to own a book shop I would call it…

Hybrid Visions.  If I were still the cheesy teenager that I was when I first came up with that name to put on stuff I made like mix tapes, that “s” at the end would be a “z.”  Heh.  [Okay, fine, full disclosure—the name of the folder where I keep my creative writing docs on my computer is still “Hybrid Visionz,” with the “z.”  So there.]

3.My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…

I’m actually really bad with remembering quotes from books, but I like this from Danzy Senna’s Caucasia:

[Narrator Birdie to her sister Cole:] “…And you know something?  Now Papa says I’m not black or white anymore.  He’s changed his tune completely.  He’s stuck on this canary thing.  It’s too much to keep up with.”

She laughed through the crying.  “I know.  Canaries in the coal mine.  Choking on all the fumes.”

I giggled, thinking of the picture of Cole and me at the bottom of his chart.  “He says there’s no such thing as race.”

She shrugged.  “He’s right, you know.  About it all being constructed.  But”—she turned to me, looking at me intently—“that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”

“I know it does,” I said nodding.  […]  “They say you don’t have to choose.  But the thing is, you do.  Because there are consequences if you don’t.”

Cole shrugged.  “Yeah, and there are consequences if you do.”

4.The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be…

Sherman Alexie.  Race, identity, culture and struggle, all tackled with the language of poetry and a magical realism that just seems so natural.

5.If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except for the SAS survival guide, it would be…

my leather-bound special edition of the entire The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy.

6.I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…

create a time bubble in which I could read as much as I wanted, for as long as I wanted, but when I came out of it I’d be back when I had started in the timeline.

7.The smell of an old book reminds me of…

being in my grandparents’ formal living room, with built-in bookshelves full of leather-bound, gilt-edged special editions published by Times Mirror when my great-great-grandfather managed the printing house.

8.If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…

hmmm…  This is a hard one, like the quote thing.  Okay, fine—Harry Potter.  [Note to self: finish that essay about multiracial allegory in the Harry Potter series.]  Heh.  Magic.  Cool.

9.The most overestimated book of all time is…

for me, White Teeth.  I really wanted to like it (multi-culti subject matter, author’s age, the hype), but I couldn’t even get through half of it.

10.    I hate it when a book…

is harder to get into or get through than I had anticipated, so much so that I end up putting it aside and never coming back.

Tag, you’re it!: Rachel from Kitchen Fire, Eliaday, Honglien123, Mamazilla, Lee Herrick, Bushelandapeck, and la dra.