Ten questions

Over at the bookworm blog there are ten questions posed to any reader who wants to answer them.

1. What's your favorite book to film adaptation?
These days, the 1995 version of Persuasion with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds, adapted from the Jane Austen novel. (In my thinking here, I'm not including movies that have overshadowed the books they're based on.)

2. What's the last book you read?
Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott. I recommend it, especially if you're struggling, stuck or starting out in writing (come to think of it, when do writers not struggle?). Or read it if you want to laugh; it's both funny and painful. In fact there are many good lessons in it even for people who aren't writers.

3. Describe yourself using just one word.
Wondering.

4. Juice or Soda?
Juice.

5. Do you have any pets?
Not recently. I used to have pet frogs, newts, and fish as a kid. But some people dear to me have just brought a puppy into their home, so I expect I'll be seeing her often and she'll be sort of like a pet to me too. Except I'm not the one paper-training her right now, thankfully.

6. Who is your hero?
At the moment it's Marie Curie: brilliant scientist, innovator, humanitarian, and teacher, and also a wife and mother. She broke ground in many ways, both for humanity as a whole and for women. She was the first scientist to win two Nobel prizes in different disciplines.

7. Give me some blogging advice.
Off the top of my head I can't think of any suggestions; I like your blog as it is. Maybe for people in general - have fun with your blog, instead of seeing it as a ball-and-chain that's dragging you down. If it is, rethink things and change it, or give yourself a break from blogging. It shouldn't bring you misery.

8. When was the last time you laughed out loud?
This morning.

9. If you could travel to any place in the world, where would it be?
I'd like to travel around the US for a few months, do a cross-country trip.

10. If you could meet any author, dead or living, who would it be?
What would you ask them?
George Eliot. I'd want to discuss her books with her, mostly Middlemarch, and hear her thoughts on them.

Edit: Just changed the blog title to reflect the fact that there are ten questions, and that I can in fact count.

Extracts: Purpose and passion (or lack thereof) in life

From Middlemarch:

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. - from Chapter 79, Sunset and Sunrise

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. - from Chapter 51, The Dead Hand

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self – never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. - from Chapter 29, Waiting for Death