WWYDR?

[sovay]

Stolen from conversation with muchabstracted and fleurdelis28:

Everybody owns their own Death. Most people just don't know about theirs. Occasionally, during the cleaning-out of a particularly recalcitrant basement or an attic full of outdated receipts and clothing that no longer fits anyone in the house, a Death is discovered sitting among the dust, often on a filing cabinet, reading a paperback novel in a foreign language. (Which foreign language, and why, depends on a system whose particulars no mortal has been able to discern. It is possible that some Deaths simply like nineteenth-century French romances, or postmodern Brazilian mysteries, better than others.) Such encounters are invariably a little awkward, generally polite, and mostly forgotten once the archaic cardboard boxes have been hauled up into the light and their contents set out for recycling, the dust-gummed typewriter either junked or repaired (or, in a few rare cases, turned into modern art), and the neglected doors closed once again. Those who have met their own Deaths prematurely remember the incident only in dreams, in disjointed symbols glimpsed through the random meshes of REM: a page of yellowed paper printed over with a language that cannot be read, a filing cabinet with drawers ajar, slanting light through a dust-glazed window or the smells of gritty cement and spilled detergent. Presumably the Deaths return to their novels, to their patient, pragmatic waiting. Their only worries are whether they will have time to begin the next Mann or Bulgakov or Amado, before they must rise, and put away the novel, and perform their appointed task at last.

So. What Would Your Death Read?

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Madame de Sévigné, Choderlos de Laclos, Alexandre Dumas père, Voltaire, Molière.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Borges. Possibly Italo Calvino, but I prefer to think of it casting stories in the Tarot the way Calvino did in Castle of Crossed Destinies. I hate Anais Nin, but I suspect my death loves her. All the novels Angela Carter never wrote.

[kraada.livejournal.com]

Definitely Terry Pratchett. Slaughtering people for eternity would get quite boring without Pratchett.

She probably also reads lots of stuff from the Library of Unfinished Works. Though damned if I remember what book that idea originally appeared in.

[zdenka]

Well, if she's anything like me: Alexandre Dumas in French, opera librettos in four or six languages, Vergil, Greek tragedies, the complete works of Arturo Perez-Reverte, and quite possibly something she won't admit to, like all of Ranma1/2. In Japanese. (I myself do not know Japanese or Spanish well enough to read novels, but perhaps my Death has had time to learn.)

[captainbutler.livejournal.com]

Well my death would read works of great general and tacticians. Stuff like Patton's speech to the 3rd army, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, collections of the writing of brilliant grandmaster Mikhail Tal, Caesar's Gallic wars, and Clausewitz's On War.

[greyselke.livejournal.com]

the Mahabharata in the original sanskrit, Chaucer, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the lost wall reliefs of Dur-Sharrukin, Umberto Eco, Edward Said, all the works of Jane Austen, and countless myths and fantasies that I have yet to have the time to hear of

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

But you haven't told us what your Death would read, sovay!

[sovay]

The collected works of Sholem Aleichem. Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ. Hoffmann's Kreisleriana and—complete with Volume III—Lebensansichten des Kater Murr. (Although I never asked what your Death would listen to, I would not be surprised to learn that mine even possesses a recording of Peter Pears in Les Contes d'Hoffmann.) Most novels of Nabokov, probably in both English and Russian; but Wilde's Salomé distinctly in French, with the Beardsley illustrations. Machado de Assis' Dom Casmurro. I have suspicions that my Death has read the Italian translation of Moonwise just for weirdness' sake, and is fluent in Czech. And has a thing for classical Greek romances: pirates, lovers, recognition scenes, and all.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

Kabbalah anthologies, with my luck. I'd wish it would go for the real thing at least- but I'm not sure it's worked its guts up for that yet. Medieval theology and poetry I think- something is telling me Ibn Gabirol- I think my Death has more patience than I do, or splits it up with romances and all the scholarly articles I'd read in small doses for kicks if I had time.