Books or something

Matthew Yglesias tagged me to discuss books. I feel like I've seen this meme before, but am too tired to Google my archives. This is the rare moment in grad school when I'm not actually reading a book, so here goes:

1. One book that's changed your life.
Bernard Lazare, Le Fumier de Job.

2. One book that you have read more than once.
Many by Philip Roth, seeing as that's about all I read pre-college. Portnoy's Complaint. Oh well.

3. One book you would want on a desert island.
Ernst Pawel's biography of Herzl.

4. One book that made you cry.
Don't think that's ever happened.

5. One book that made you laugh.
The beginning of Absurdistan and of that Jonathan Safran Foer book. All Adrian Mole. Some of Swann's Way is clearly witty and amusing. I'm sophisticated enough to appreciate this, but not to respond to it the way I do to, say, Seinfeld.

6. One book you wish had been written.
All the one's I've ever started. If it doesn't exist and I want to read it I should probably write it.

7. One book you wish had never been written.
Some guy from Stuyvesant apparently wrote a novel about it. I wanted to write the Stuyvesant novel, but if it's been done... That, and Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed. Mighty annoying and smug.

8. One book you are currently reading.
This amounts to which classes I'm taking. Lots of French literature, 1700-present. Everything else can wait. One assigned book I especially enjoyed was Montesquieu's Lettres persanes.

9. One book you've been meaning to read.
Every single thing about French Jewish history and every single thing on the MA reading list. It'll happen, just not all this evening.