All About Books discussion

This is a very fun questionnaire, glad I stumbled on to it.
Here are the questions I am responding to: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/... I try to will answer each one in a complete sentence.

1. I did not always love books. I was a forced to read as a child by my mother (who didn't want me watching T.V. all the time), but mostly looked at the pictures of books that I had. It was not until the 8th grade that I learned to love reading--or at least "like" it.

2. Didn't really have a favorite author when I was young. I liked the books of Ezra Jack Keats and Dr. Seuss, but that was relative.

3. Books that I remember from school. I'm going to limit this to grade school, because college was a whole different ball-game. I must have read Macbeth 3 times. The first time was fine, but the subsequent overexposure has made it not among my favorites, which is a shame because it is one of Shakespeare's best. My 11th grade literature class stands-out to me because it was the most enjoyment I ever got out of a literature class in my whole life. A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman was the stand-out, but I also read a lot of Poe that year.

4. I can read in just about any setting, though I am a "mood" reader. I prefer a quiet setting, but I can deal with noise if I concentrate and what I am reading is engaging enough to tune-out the noise around me.

5. Five books and why I like them:
Invisible Man - Taught me what an "individual" was.
The Sickness unto Death - Taught me what a Christian should be.
Hamlet - Greatest play ever written.
The Brothers Karamazov - Greatest novel ever written.
The Souls of Black Folk (Everyman's Library) - If you try to talk about racism or xenophobia in the Western world without reading this book, I will be tuning you out because you don't know what your talking about.

6. When I was an undergraduate I preferred non-fiction. Currently I am deep into fiction books.

7. Writers I am fond of....I'm gonna use Goodreads' analytics for this. Not gonna count Comic book writers, because the for mat is serialized and the numbers are necessarily huge. According to GR, my most read authors are Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, Plato, Poe, T.S. Eliot and Ta-Nehisi Coates (I love his journalistic work). I guess I keep reading them because they keep being good. I never think about this question because I am always trying to read new stuff.

8. Authors I have yet to read, but really want to: E.L. Doctorow, Malcolm Gladwell, Václav Havel, Wole Soyinka, D.T. Suzuki and Jorge Luis Borges for a start.

9. I originally joined Goodreads specifically to keep track of my reading.

10. I am reading and have read a few books this year, but the best so far seems to be the novel I am currently reading: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. I have no idea what I am reading next.

Ken wrote: "8. Authors I have yet to read, but really want to: E.L. Doctorow, Malcolm Gladwell, Václav Havel, Wole Soyinka, D.T. Suzuki and Jorge Luis Borges for a start...."

I will recommend Soyinka's play Death and the King's Horseman.

You read my mind, already have it in the bookcase.

We featured another of his plays here back in 2016, The Lion and the Jewel, and my library edition had that in it also. Both are very good but I think Death and the King's Horseman was slightly more powerful.

If you are interested in looking at the (somewhat desultory) discussion, it is located here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Since I first posted this, a few details have changed--specifically with #8 & #10.

I've since read Doctorow, Suzuki, and Borges.

I actually put If on a Winter's Night a Traveler on hold and have not gone back to it since.