Tag. I'm it.

I was recently tagged by Fruit Fly with the most maddeningly difficult meme. I have it on good authority that this was done purposefully, to see whether I would go completely insane. I'm happy to say that the nice young men in their clean white coats have patched me up fairly well; with discharge papers in hand, I have returned to take a shot at completing the request.


Total Number of Books I've Owned

Good God almighty, what kind of question is that? Shall I count the grains of sand on a beach? Should I number the stars in the heavens? Should I stop exaggerating?

I did a quick and entirely inaccurate count, and I would guess I have the better part of 300 in my office alone. Then there are the stacks in the garage, the random books all over the house, and my wife's books (communal property, no?) And these are just the one's that I currently own. I wouldn't hazard a guess, but a complete shot in the dark is probably more than 500, less than 2000.


Last Book I Bought

I believe that the last book that I bought was the Baby Einstein "What Floats?" I personally have a good idea of what floats (small rocks? gravy? a duck!), so this was for my son.

The last books that I bought for myself were Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and "The Final Solution", which I discussed earlier.


Last Book I Read

The last book that I read was Donaldson's "The Runes of the Earth", which I also, briefly posted about.


Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me

So far, so good. Here's the tricky one. How do you compress a lifetime of reading into 5 books? How much weight should your favorite childhood books carry against the masters of literature? This is where I cracked, and the nice young men intervened. During the lobotomy, it finally struck me that I didn't need to list my 5 all-time favorite books, but one's that, for whatever reason, mean a lot to me.

The best I can give is an approximation, and I have to be okay with that. This will always be in flux, and my answer tomorrow will very likely be different from what you see below.

But fuck it, let's begin:




The Haunted Spy was my absolute favorite book when I was a little KOM. A POM, I guess. I was obsessed with it, and had to have read to me every night for years. My poor, sainted Dad never complained, though, and read it whenever requested until I was old enough to read my own stories. Years later, I discovered that the book was lost to me.

One day I was speaking to my dad about this and that, and I mentioned offhand that the book was out of print, and the best that I could find at the time was a copy missing its cover and retailing on eBay for $200.00. I had hoped to purchase it for my newly born son so that I could share my favorite story with him.

That Christmas, my Dad gave me the copy that you see above. It is obviously well loved but very much intact. Inside he wrote a dedication to my son and I.

It was the best present that I have ever received.





Like Fruit Fly, this was one of my picks. Of course we read the curriculum classics in school - To Kill a Mockingbird, The Pearl, Jane Eyre, etc. But this was the first time that I really understood the power of an author, and how he could speak directly to me. The narrative is simple and lighthearted, but the subtext is powerful and dark. How I missed Vonnegut in school, or why he is not required reading I will never know.

This is one of two books that I currently consider all-time favorite that will be in this list.




Ah, Gogol. I stole this book from my 12th grade High School teacher. Well, not this book. This copy is a replacement for the original, which I gave to a friend as a present. I'm one of those people that can't throw away or donate books. But I often give them to the people that I think will enjoy them, and am forced to later purchase another copy. Sadly, the replacement does not contain the story "Taras Bulba" which was incredible, and I miss very much.

But I digress. Gogol introduced me to my love of Russian literature. It also awakened an awareness of "old" books in me that had been dormant. It was like the first time that you saw a good episode of the Twilight Zone, and realized that black and white is acceptable if the story transcends the cultural limitations of the piece. He was the doorway to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and for this reason alone the book is one which means a lot to me.




There was a great bookstore downtown that was owned by hermetic cat people. They would actually swap book-for-book. If you didn't have a book to swap, they offerd used and inexpensive ones. In my early twenties, when I was dirt poor, this was the greatest thing that I had ever known.

There was a whole rack dedicated to the "classics". This ran the gamut from Shakespeare to the legend of Gilgamesh, to Ayn Rand to... you get the idea. As a special treat for myself, once a week I would enter the store, center myself in front of the rack and close my eyes. I would reach out and grab a book, then purchase it sight unseen.

Some were better than others, but none were bad. Many have been my all-time favorites.

One day I chanced upon Magister Ludi. Herman Hesse shot through me like a bolt of lightning. I'm not sure that I even left the store until I was finished. I devoured everything by Hesse that I could get my hands on - Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Under the Wheel... but at the end of the day, that first magical moment was the best. This is the second all-time favorite on this list.

In the back of my head, Hesse still whispers the answers to my spiritual questions. And then he raises more questions that he refuses to answer.




I had been aware of Sagan for years. One of my favorite bad impressions was to glutterally pronounce "Billion and billions of stars!"

But this book caught me off guard. It gave hypothetical answers to questions that I had never before raised. I hate to bring this into every post ("Dude, we were sooo high, and..."), but it came at a time when I was "experimenting" with several controlled substances. I don't know if it was Sagan or the altered consciousness, but I really got it. I grokked it, man. And it forever changed the way that I think about certain aspects of humanity and our world.


Tag five people and have them do this on their blog

So, there we go. It was a longer ride than I had intended, but if you kept your arms and legs in the vehicle you should have come out the other side relatively unscathed.

Tag, you're it:

Lisa (or "Lisa", just to keep it democratic).
PSUMommy
Talleulah
JOAT
Kaci

And a couple of people that I believe are out of town, or might not want to play, but I would be interested in hearing about:

IX
Yawn
MPH
Jane