Book Thingy
Murdoc tagged me with this meme over the weekend. Why the hell not?
1. Total Number of Books I Own: Somewhere north of 2500. In my life, I have probably owned another 1000 or more books that I either lost, sold, or gave away. I imagine I have read all but a few of those books.
2. The Last Book I Bought: I bought David Reynold’s new biography of John Brown (he of “nits make lice” fame) because neither Borders nor Barnes and Noble had Bennett’s Anglosphere Challenge. Haven’t started it yet, because I’m reading a free online book.
3. The Last Book I Read: Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban. I’m rereading the series, backwards, in preparation for the release of book six sometime next month. I liked it better than the first time. (I liked book five a lot better the second time. First time I read it, I was rather disappointed.)
4. Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me: These aren’t in any particular order. While any number of non-fiction books have greatly increased my knowledge, or even changed my opinions dramatically; none have had the effect that fiction has had. Fiction, at its best, really gets me where I live.
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. I read this when I was young, maybe eleven years old. Tolkien created such an extraordinarily dense mythology, it was easy to get lost (in a good way) in the story. Heroism, good v. evil, magical landscapes and creatures, and the feel of ancient wonder. The books felt old in a way that no other thing I have read ever have, even stories written hundreds of years earlier.
- The Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson. This book meant a quite a lot to me fifteen years ago. Blew my mind when I read it. I tried to reread it a few months ago and couldn’t get more than thirty pages in. This book, and the Shroedinger’s Cat trilogy, made a huge impact on my habits of thinking. Wilson would no doubt be disappointed that his books did not arrest my slide into conservatism, but they certainly affected the kind of conservative I became. The thing that stuck with me most from this book was not that reality is relative, but that everyone does have their own perception of it. And everyone is the hero in their own personal narrative.
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein. I think this is Heinlein’s greatest novel. Where the politics of Illuminatus didn’t quite take hold, it was probably because this book had already made firm claim to essential mindshare. (And to a lesser extent, Starship Troopers and most of the juveniles.) Rationalism, liberty, guns. It’s all there, plus a computer throwing rocks.
- Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner. The first book I ever read that made future shock real, and then went on to show how it could be a good thing. Science fiction is in large an antidote to future shock – my typical response to innovation is, “About frickin’ time!” The horizon for “worrying” technological development is, for me, very far in the future.
- The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester; and The Dosadi Experiment, by Frank Herbert. Okay, so I’m cheating a little. These two books, read just after I gradumatated from high school, reaffirmed my sense of wonder. In completely different ways, they had a similar effect on my consciousness. The idea that you can improve your consciousness, your self in ways vastly different and better than the pabulum offered by mindless self-help books lingered a long time… Science fiction here less concerened with spaceships and rayguns, but with the mind.
Maybe it’s the way my mind is wired, but non-sf fiction doesn’t grab me the way sf does. It doesn’t effect me in any deep sense. I have read a fair amount of the canonical literature, and enjoyed it. Been amazed, in fact, at its quality, its insight into the human condition. None of it hit me like these books, though. Maybe if the list was ten or fifteen, we’d start seeing Shakespeare and other writers that a literature professor would recognize. In a world so profoundly altered by technology, a literature that explores more than mere alienation is the only thing that can explain our world to ourselves.
At this point, I’m supposed to invite others to join in the madness. In the interest of being incestuous, I tag all my cobloggers. But in keeping with the precedents set before me, I nominate: The Maximum Leader, if he reads; Ken The Oldsmoblogger, ‘cause he’s from Cleveland; Phil Dennison, ‘cause he’s from Cleveland; John Hudock of Commonsense and Wonder ‘cause he should be from Cleveland and I feel real bad about not linking him in ages; and finally Dave at Garfield Ridge, ‘cause he’s new to the blogroll. Like Murdoc said, “If you don't want to, let me know so that I can badger you about it. If you've already played this game, let me know so I can badger someone else.”
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Instead of reprinting my own
Instead of reprinting my own list here, I'll just refer you to it on my own blog at http://www.ianthealy.com/Blog.htm (I don't know how to code links here - ain't I dum?).
EDog
Total Number of Books I Own:
Total Number of Books I Own: I ought rightly to have a better idea than I do, since I just moved, and had to hump about 30 boxes of them. I would guess under 1,000, and more than 600.
The Last Book I Bought: I haven’t the foggiest; it’s been that long. Which in my book (no pun intended) is progress. I used to be a book-buying fiend. Now the library is my friend. The last book I checked out was Human, All Too Human, yesterday.
The Last Book I Read: Well, the last book I *finished* was Starship Troopers (again). But that was to take a break from The Story of English and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Ever since I finished school, I'm a big fan of reading whatever I want, however long it takes me. Because I can.
Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me: This took a lot more thought than I cared to give it when I started. I think this list would change if I was staring at every book I owned and really dwelling on them. It might also change according to my mood when I prepared the list. It might also garner me a 5th title; as it is, I’m just stuck on 4. But as of this second, we get:
1. The Hobbit This work always resonated more strongly with me than LoTR did. I enjoyed the latter of course, but it was more like being richly rewarded after working hard. The Hobbithas more charm and fun. I read it first when I was about 10 or 11, and re-read it every couple years. I enjoy it every time.
2. 1984 I read this when I was 12. I remember because I bought a commemorative paperback edition in the summer of 1984. It was like nothing I’d ever read before: scarier than any space monster, demon, dragon, or other member of the menacing menageries that threatened from the books I was reading then. 1984 may have been the first grown-up book I’d read, enjoyed, and most importantly, appreciated. I still remember getting goosebumps and going slack-jawed when Winston is finally found out.
How often does any written work have a direct impact on the physical world, on your own body? Not very.
3. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman. Admittedly, I never read this work in its entirety until two summers ago. What I had read was a short story called simply, “Hero”, which lived in a bargain-bin sci-fi anthology my mother bought me at the drugstore for $5 as an afterthought ca 1985. To spare you a discussion of the copyright suits, tangled publishing rights, and general fuckiness at work on the business side of the story, “Hero” was actually the first chapter or so of The Forever War. And I never even knew that there was a complete novel until I was well into my 20s.
Haldeman was the first author I read who included physics in his universe. There are profound martial, social, mental, and physical consequences deriving from light-speed travel (actually, instantaneous travel via stable wormholes), all of which serves as a rich backdrop to the story of humanity’s first experience with an alien species. I identified with the hero, a smarty pants and reluctant conscript, as well as Haldeman’s totally kick-ass powered infantry.
This work, or at least that little piece of it I got in 1985, was near my bedside for the better part of 20 years.
4. All Quiet on the Western Front Probably my first exposure to the literature of conflict. No other work of its type ever caused me to care about the characters so much; no other author- well known folks like Wouk, James Jones, Mailer, Herr, Caputo- gripped my soul like Remarque. Quite probably the best thing I read in high school; certainly the one work I got the most out of. This is another title I re-read every couple years. And All Quiet… served as my first window into World War One, a conflict and era I spent a lot of time in later in life.
I think without Remarque, the teen-aged me may never have gotten a glimpse of the literary dimension of the war, and might have just left it as another horrific experience in the life of Man. This work is an engrossing, yet gentle, introduction to WW1, and may be the best one.
1. Total Number of Books I
1. Total Number of Books I Own: This number is surprisingly low, probably in the neighborhood of 3-400. Counting the Johno Library Annex in the basement of Buckethead Central, that might hit 500 max. My wife is both a librarian and a Hun when it comes to organization, so several purges over the last few years have reduced my collection to the ones I really, actually want to keep. Other previous purges after graduate school probably knocked my collection from 2000 or so down to 800ish, and after much pain and introspection, I arrive where I am today. Moreover, our collection is "one in, one out." I buy a book, I have to choose one to give the boot.
2. The Last Book I Bought: This was Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook by Shel Silverstein, purchased for my niece and nephew. The last one I bought for myself must have been a paperback of Russell Banks' outstanding novel about John Brown, Cloudsplitter. I highly recommend it as a coda (or prelude) to the David Reynolds bio of Brown that Buckethead just bought and that I am currently halfway through.
3. The Last Book I Read: Michael Chabon, The Final Solution, a fine novella about Sherlock Holmes' last case.
4. Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me:
Lord of the Rings. I wore out two paperback editions before I was sixteen, and must have read the trilogy twenty times or more by now.
Neuromancer: William Gibson. See Lord of the Rings above. It was the first science fiction novel I read that presented a grittier, semi-realist view of the future; a view that an older Johno would recognize as noir-ish or Chandleresque. It sparked my deep interest in science fiction that has not abated to this day. Buckethead has Heinlein, GeekLethal has Haldeman, and I have Gibson. And we, we will always have Paris in the spring.
The Long Goodbye: Raymond Chandler. Although I namechecked Chandler in the Gibson blurb above, I actually like this book for entirely different reasons. Since I wrote nearly 300 words on Chandler's deployment of morality and duty in respect to the character Philip Marlowe, and the freedom which plotlessness gives a fine writer which my browser then deigned to erase, I will only say this: who doesn't like a good gimlet with some ennui on the side?
High Fidelity: Nick Hornby. It is more than trite to say so, but when my (then-future) wife and I were becoming close (a dance I let go on far too long), I had her watch the film and read the book, merely telling her, "you'll understand afterwards."
Red Sorghum: Mo Yan. What GeekLethal said about All Quiet and the literature of conflict applies here. In some books- be they fiction or nonfiction- the horrible things man does to man are treated as theoreticals, arguments in some bloody moot court. Even the most meticulous, vivid descriptions of Gettysburg, the Battle of the Bulge or Iwo Jima fail to bring across the sheer awfulness of war on the personal level: the chaos, the confusion, the individual horrors. Each person's resolution to fight. Each person's struggle with fear. Men screaming as they scrabble to hold their entrails in. Women thrashing as their rapists get in line. Children running out to play and splashing their brains upon the earth. Yan's semiautobiographical novel about two generations of Chinese peasants resisting outside attack (warlords, then the Japanese) brings every individual tragedy into sharp focus and sets it in a landscape constructed entirely of oversaturated colors and fecund harvests. A storm roiling black over the waving heads of red sorghum. The green and brown of a riverbank as someone's wife falls down it, shot by the Japanese. The dun of a mule, its anus tied shut to keep five hundred rounds of ammunition inside, groaning turds and bullets onto the ground in an avalanche of red and black as its belly is split open. When I first read it, the book gave me some really messed up dreams, and although I have only read it twice now in ten years, Yan's images stay with me always like a bad dream I can't shake.
Total Number of Books I Own:
1. Total Number of Books I Own: Between 1000 and 1500, depending on what stage of the purge cycle my wife happens to be in. Every five years or so, she'll declare war on the boxed books in one of our attics, and decide that those both worn out and unlikely to be read again should be given back to the earth. Pre-marriage, the number was around 2500, since I was given my pick of my Dad's library after my parents' divorce. As I recall, he had around 7000 items and was on a first name basis with all the clerks at Krochs & Brentanos in Chicago, among other places.
2. The Last Book I Bought: It's hard to say, because the last book I bought was actually three books from Amazon, last week. Due to their devilishly clever marketing, I never buy just one book - I always get enough to at least get the free shipping. (Odd - I don't honestly care what shipping costs, so why avoid the expenditure? Beats me). As usually happens when I Amazon in bulk, they were all three by Michael Lewis: Liar's Poker, The Money Culture, and Moneyball.
3. The Last Book I Read: Freakonomics, by Levitt & Dubner.
4. Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me:
a & b) I'm with G on this one - Lord of the Rings was excellent, but if I hadn't read The Hobbit, I might have been less prepared to enjoy it. More properly, relative to the Hobbit and the trilogy, before I read them on my own, I'd already had them all read to me at least three times by my father, who used to regularly sit us all down for an hour or two of reading several nights a week. The manner of initial delivery may have been more important in the books' impact on me than the underlying story, but I think not. Of course, I have to add LOTR itself to my list.
c) Very LOTR-like: The Stand, by Stephen King. My first taste of King's work, and a classic, for me, in the juxtaposition between good and evil.
d) I know this ain't Amazon, but I'll gang up on authors here too, and state that It, also by Stephen King, is one I've read many times just to enjoy the story again. A well-told tale about friendships and commitments. And monsters who live in sewers, of course.
e) Not to try go out-geek Ross on the economics side of things, but Frederic Bastiat's Economic Sophisms. Primarily a rejection of protectionism, secondarily an interesting deconstruction of things "everyone knows to be true", but that aren't. A model for pricking balloons needing pricked, along with the pricks that manufacture them.