The Taking of the Farenheit Four, Five-One

[jack_babalon]

Before work yesterday I caught Truffaut's 1966 adaptation of the Bradbury classic, Farenheit 451 for the first time. It was on Turner Classic Movies and chanced upon it while channel surfing. Much different than the book (though I read the book some twenty odd years ago admittedly) it turned out to be quite an enjoyable romp of dystopian sci-fi even if they swapped America for Britain and a nuclear war at the end for a jet-pack pursuit.

There was one part at the ending that stuck with me. Where Montag escapes and finds the land of the 'Book Men', the self-exiled vagabonds who have devoted themselves to the memorization of a single book until it supplants their identity. For example, at the movie's conclusion the hero devotes himself to becoming Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

Which got me to wondering... what book would I be?

This question ran in the back of my head for most of the night and by dawn I had decided I would want to be Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. My reasons for such are many, but a main one being that it delivered to me an early awakening of wanting to work with the written word.

Now I'm kinda curious... if you were going to 'be' a single book and would be responsible for its entire memorization.... what book would you choose?