The Book of Questions: Revised and Updated

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You know you will die of an incurable disease within three months. Would you allow yourself to be frozen within the week if you knew it would give you a modest chance of being revived in 1,000 years and living a greatly extended life?" If you can’t find a guide for the book your club is reading, we’ve put together this helpful list of book club questions. These general book club questions are some of our favorites, and work well for almost any book, whether you’re reading fiction or non-fiction. The Nobel laureate’s poems evoke pictures that make sense on a visual level before the reader can grasp them on a literal one. The effect is mildly dazzling… O’ Daly’s translations achieve a tone that is both meditative and spontaneous.” — Publishers Weekly Pablo Neruda was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His late-career and playful Book of Questions is a terrific book of poetry, probably not intended exclusively for children. I’ll call it an “all ages” book of poetry, which means that children can also read it, which illustrator Paloma Valdiva recognized in creating this book. The hardcover book is beautifully designed, and the mode of illustration is collage, accessible for kids, translated for this bilingual edition by Sara Lissa Paulson If you found a book of more than 217 hypothetical questions and their follow-ups and could use it as an excuse to achieve a deeper understanding of yourself or someone else, would you?

Would it disturb you much if, upon your death, your body were simply thrown into the woods and left to rot? Why?" Fast forward to when I moved into my own apartment in college: they were delighted to dump many of their well-worn possessions--including this book--into my lap. I used this book many a time with new and old friends to get to know them better, both in college, in my 20s and beyond. It's a great after dinner activity at a dinner party when the conversation has lulled, because everybody gets to know a lot about everybody else and everybody seems to like it. The questions, a mix of "what would you do in this situation" and "what's more important to you: x or y?" and other psychological questions, are thought provoking and entertaining. Of course, there's no right or wrong answer and every time I've used the book, people have seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. Highly recommended. I dare you to tell me you did not answer at least one of the above questions automatically! Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician.

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There are some poems one must simply take in visually and revel in the imagery they invoke discarding their literariness. Some of the problems aren’t all that bad, but they reveal a lot about you I would think. Take Question 001 for example. It goes like this:

Rate this book on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Why did you give the book the rating you did? Did any part of this book club discussion change your rating from what it would have been directly after finishing the book?There is an ironic reversal of expectation in this: Many poems have been written to praise the beauty of fruit and flowers, but roots are often overlooked as merely functional. What does it mean to see the splendor of roots? It can be seen as a political metaphor about the economic base upon which the superstructure is built. These are Marxist terms, relevant to analyzing Neruda’s poetry because he was an active member of the Communist Party. So, this short poem can be seen as a nod to the masses who do the work to keep society alive, but whose labor is concealed by ideology. Alternatively, this could be read a spiritual metaphor, or a reworking or reversal of the famous Dylan Thomas poem that begins “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/Is my destroyer.” Roots can also refer to ancestry, so it could also be read as a metaphor for an improper shame towards one’s family history. What a majestic way to end his last collection of the verses... And what a suitable poem for the picture outside my window at the moment... The subject of the question is a rose, a common symbol of beauty in poetry. The poem personifies the rose, imagining her as a woman. Then we are to consider the rose’s appearance: is she naked or wearing a dress? This is a question about beauty and appearances. If the rose is naked, she is concealing nothing. Her beauty is intrinsic to her being, and she simply is, without mystery. What if she is wearing a “dress”? It would have to be her “only” dress, as roses don’t change their petals to suit different occasions. If she is wearing a dress, the implication is that she is hiding something under the surface—that reality is concealed. This could also be a question about human perception. What do we see when we see a rose? Do we see the real rose "itself," or only the appearance of the rose? Is the beauty of the rose intrinsic to it, or something that we humans create? In this seemingly simple question, the poem poses one of the most profound questions about the nature of reality and beauty, placing it in the realm of philosophy, of metaphysics and aesthetics. It may also be an indication that Neruda read the Critique of Judgment by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, which considers the rose as a subject to explore human judgment of beauty. William O’Daly’s fine translations of the Nobel winner Pablo Neruda’s posthumous books… are gently astonishing, the way good poetry should be.” — Crossroads I've known Pablo Neruda since my teenage years when his romantic love poems kept me awake at night. But this set of poems presented as questions touch me even deeper. It is just a statement that a human being do not stop to answer questions even after long long life.. It is published posthumously, and he died in a year i was born. So it is like an invisible thread between the times for me. Eternity...