A meme!

Wanda has tagged me for a book meme (thanks, Wanda!), so, after knitting and contemplating last evening, here goes (fair warning, I have trouble making decisions, so I cheated and slipped in multiple answers for some):

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why? Paperback. I love to carry books around wherever I go, and hardcovers are heavy. They're also unwieldy to hold in one hand, or to read while lying down.
2. If I were to own a book shop, I would call it... This one should be easy (I actually worked at a naming and branding company for a while), but I find it oddly difficult. Maybe, The Magic Carpet? I know that it would have lots of comfy, squooshy chairs, and maybe a cat or two (I know, hard on allergic folks, but this is my fantasy), and space for children to sit on cushions in the kids' section to look at the books, and coffee and tea and scones (ditto re the spilling, but again, it's my fantasy!).
3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is..."There's nothing half so much fun as simply messing about with boats." Wind in the Willows. This is an unfair quote of me to put, since I've never read that book the whole way through, but it's one of our family's favorite quotes in spite of that fact. Maybe because we all love the water.
4. The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be...I think I'm going to go with a bunch of other people and say Madeleine L'Engle. Can I have her and Ursula Le Guin together? And there's this small part of me that would like to meet Heinlein, just to see if he's as sexist as he seems in his books (which are, nevertheless, wonderful stories)(I guess I could add Chaucer under the lunch-with-apparent-sexists-who-are-nevertheless-interesting list, too).
5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except for the SAS survival guide, it would be… This was a hard one, but I kept coming back to one answer: the OED; not only does it have all those nifty words, but all of the quotes of their first attested use with each meaning! It doesn't get much better than that. And, if I could slip it in, The American Heritage Indo-European Root Dictionary.
6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that… held my book and turned the pages, so I could read and knit without having to use spare silverware to hold books open.
7. The smell of an old book reminds me of... Used bookstores, and the excitement of finding a good book, and of opening it, and wondering what it will be like, and who has read it before me, and what they thought of it, and who they were, and why they bought the book, and then sold the book. I think I prefer used books to new -- I get not only the story in the book, but the story of the book (even if I have to make it up myself).
8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…either someone who has come through hard times with their integrity and sense of self intact, like Cordelia Vorkosigan in the Vorkosigan Saga or the main character in L'Engle's A Severed Wasp, or someone who can do impossible things that belong to a fantasy world, like Egwene al'Vere in the Wheel of Time series. But I'd want a ticket home for afterwards, so I could tell the girls all about it.
9. The most overestimated book of all times is…most bestsellers. The sequel to Dune.
10. I hate it when a book…is so badly (or, frankly, over-) written that the writing distracts me from the story.

Oh, boy. Now I have to tag people. Forgive me if you've already gotten this one; I'm only mentioning a few people, but join in if you want! Anne, Janice, Stell, Adrienne (that's what you get for drawing my name out for a prize!).

I made progress on both the sock and Kauni yesterday (yes, I have taken it out of the doghouse, and am now back where I was before the frogging began; it's behaving), and, with luck, I'll post a few pictures this evening, when I've finished wading through a pile of papers to grade, and another pile of papers to read to prep for class tomorrow (!!).