It's all meme meme meme
Dear Reader, you have Glo to blame for this.
The Number Of Books I Own
On my personal three-part counting scale*, Some. Used to be Lots, but in the course of manymany moves**, I got a bit tired of the inevitable “stick ‘em in storage” routine, and decided that henceforth I would always have all my books with me. So I got rid of most of them. I’ve been working on rebuilding the collection, of course, but I tend to do a cull with every move. I’m more picky about what I actually buy these days though – they have to look good and I have to really believe I will read them, more than once, and want to lend them out – so there’s not a lot I can bear to get rid of. I do sometimes miss my glorious collection of Old and Beautiful (but unreadable) books. But not too much.
The Last Books I Bought
Had a bit of a binge lately, actually. Since Friday I have bought: Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion and The System of the World (because I’ve just been racing through Quicksilver – I’ve been hauling its 900-page hardback ass around in my handbag, it’s that good); Sheri Tepper’s The Companions (because I am devoted to the woman and insist on owning all her titles, despite rather patchy writing); Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and Children of God (because see below; I haven’t actually read CoG yet); and one of Beloved’s birthday presents***, title unrevealable because he might be reading this, who knows.
Last Book I Read
Just finishing up Quicksilver, and have started John Barth’s Coming Soon!!!, but it’s irritating the crap out of me and I may not bother with the rest. Last book completed: um… James Thurber’s Life and Hard Times. In a single train journey, so I’m not sure it quite counts, somehow.
Five Books That Mean A Lot
Just five?
Hm.
Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth – Glo is quite right, despite (ahem) deliberately rewriting the title. Because I read it at the tender age of 17 and it cast blinding white light deep into my psyche – so obvious, so necessary. I still can’t believe Beloved hasn’t got round to it. I really want the whole world to read this book****.
Mervyn Peake’s Book of Nonsense. Because it’s the most perfect distillation of nonsense ever written – whimsical, dark, surreal and simple.
Sheri Tepper’s Raising the Stones. Okay, it’s the middle book of a trilogy, and Grass is more widely admired, but this is the one I love. A god that actually works*****. It’s beautiful.
Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. Because this is religious SF that is intelligent, beautifully written, uncompromising, and can be read equally well by non-SF fans and, for that matter, non-religion fans.
[Just one spot left, folks, who’s gonna make the cut… Terry Pratchett? Jane Austen? Tolkien?]
Tom Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. I can’t explain why. It just is. Every time I see it in a store, I am overcome with the desire to buy it for *someone*.
And since I have no self-discipline, I can’t possibly stop without mentioning two more absolutely vital reads: Gore Vidal’s Kalki (the ultimate mindfuck) and Moris Farhi’s Journey Through the Wilderness. I know you’ve never heard of it. But it is one of the very few books I can honestly describe as “a transformative vision”.
One Book I Wish I Could Burn
The entire works of Stephen Donaldson.
No, I’m not going to defend my desire to do this, as offensive as it is to the pure spirit of bibliophilia, nor my interesting twist on "one book". Nor my blatant stealing of this category from Glo, who surely invented it (but with added realism).
You’ve been pinged
Extemporanea. Go on, show us.
Gersh. You’re not writing nearly enough to keep me happy, greedy as I am; maybe something non-merger-related would be a restorative.
Anonymous. Stop rolling your eyes and just stick it in the comment box. Please.
PS: It occurs to me that, for a remedial SF fan******, there's a lot of genre in this list. And for a non-religious person, there's a lot of religion. What can I say. I'm an enigma.
___
* A Bit; Some; Lots. This is as far as measuring goes in my kitchen. You really don’t need a more refined scale for cooking, surely?
** Not eight. Just manymany. I don’t do troll maths.
*** There are some books that I will never buy for myself, only for Beloved, but we both know I’m as excited about them as he is. There’s a logic to it but to explain more would be to leave Clues for himself.
**** But I still love my lipstick. As does Naomi herself, so there.
***** Though I’ve gotten a little tired of her liberal use of the deus ex machina in later novels. Especially the aliens that turn up to sort everything out with miraculous nanotechnology, a la The Visitor. Sure. Whatever.
****** Though I somehow found myself captaining the sinking ship that was the University of Cape Town Tolkien Society, I never actually finished reading Lord of the Rings until three years later. I gravitate to the SF shelves in any library or store, but have read remarkably little of the genre. I recently completed a questionnaire about early reading habits of SF fans and realised I couldn't remember a single one of the SF books I read as a kid, other than some Ray Bradbury. That's why I say I'm a remedial SF fan.
6 comments:
Yes - The Sparrow. I read it two or three years ago. Every now and then I find myself thinking about some of her scenes, no apparent reason or trigger. Few books have had that kind of lingering effect on me; hers is one.
I think I've put off reading CoG because of this. It's not...I don't know. I can separate fiction from reality (whatever that is), but her writing touched deeper, or maybe touched a different "place" than most books I've read.
And it wasn't a completely pleasant sensation. Which I suppose is like, a roundabout compliment, attesting to her skill and "power" as a writer.
If you've started CoG, what fo you think of it so far?
OOOOh! This challenge is bad for me. There were too many books on this list that I haven't read yet and now must! Thank heavens I ride a train 2 hours every day, so have plenty of time for devouring beloved books.
I did create the burn category. I couldn't resist such tales as Biochemistry gave me.
Jam, I'll let you know as soon as I get there - probably this weekend.
Glo, I know what you mean. I can never quite accept the obvious truth that I will never have time to read all the books worth reading. Dammit. Thank heavens for commuting, indeedy.
You appear to be a member not only of the I Hate Tom Cruise society, but the Club Steven Donaldson to Death Club, of which I also consider myself a convicted and active member. The man is deeply, horribly, inutterably pretentious. Have you ever done the thump-self-with-hammer thing and counted the number of times he uses the word "excruciate"? Honestly. Some writers shouldn't be allowed postgraduate degrees, it brings out the worst in them...
Shall accept your challenge. Darn you, woman!
To keep the Scrivener off my case:
Numbers wise, it's now far, far less - i decided i didn't *truly* have to know about the dress sense of Druids, or the mythology-written-as-history of Early England. I have taken the feng shui approach to my bookshelf - if i'm not *really* gonna read it in the next year, it must go to someone who will do so, freeing up space for better books to come along. In short, now a mere two bookcases.
Last books bought: Cloud Atlas. Many, many thanks to extemporanea for saying how good it was. (One i'm desperate to read purely because of the title is '30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account' by Peter Carey.) Oh, and The Goldberg Variations, which won't make sense until i've read them all. Musical intertextuality, yay!
Mr Easton Ellis's Glamorama, i believe, is the last book i read (obviously i'm excluding all the books about finance that i *have* to read for my job), which was insufferable at first but gets much better if you can drive your way through the name-dropping.
Five books that mean a lot to me? Heavens. Okay: 'The Devil's Larder', because it's by Jim Crace (genius) and because it's a book of short stories all about food. And sometimes *by* food. What's not to love? Incredibly evocative. I wish i could write like Mr Crace does.
'Italian Pleasures', because of its boyfriend-and-boyfriend authors Leavitt and Mitchell who wrote other (better) books, its love affair with Rome (check) and especially odd little out-of-the-way places in Rome (check) and its cute Picasso-esque drawings of tabbies, tomatoes and taglietelle. (Ahem. I do read books without pictures, really i do.)
'Me Talk Pretty One Day' (thanks to Scroobious), because i'd never laughed quite so hard until i discovered littleredboat.co.uk. I don't know if being funny should qualify for this list, but the sheer number of people who have enjoyed similar mirth from my one copy should (currently 8, i believe).
Oooh, wait, 'Love & Freindship' (sic), because you can't *not* have a Jane Austen novel as a favourite, and because i'd never laughed so hard (until 'Me Talk Pretty'), and because i can re-read it and it never stops being brilliant. Any Austen, really - Northanger Abbey a close second.
Go on, groan now: a book that really means the world to me is my book of arie antiches, all transcribed into keys for maximum comfort for a baritone, with the ornaments written in and a short history of when each was written and first performed. I don't care if that's not considered literary enough, i love it and it has eanred me much applause at several concerts.
One book that should be burnt: The hateful 'Da Vinci Code'. Wait, toss in 'Tuscany for Beginners' too, and those dreadful Kathy Lette books. Oh, and those abysmal Robert Louis Stevenson tomes. And 'Wide Sargasso Sea', not because it's not a great idea but because the writing is atrocious. And definitely burn Robinson Crusoe, unless you play to read JM Coetzee's 'Foe', which wouldn't make it into my top 5 favourite books but is certainly most accomplished.
I hate when I get too busy to reply to my comments. I end up back here days later, writing replies that will probably never be read. *sigh*
Extemporanea: Right. And nothing's ever green or silver, it's ALWAYS verdant or argent. And Thomas Covenant is a pain in the butt. And his plotting is so repetitive. There is absolutely no redemptive value to Donaldson whatsoever.
Anonymous: Thank you, sweetiedahling, and you're absolutely right on many counts. The Jane Austens, etc.
Gersh: Thank you, also. I've never dared read Finnegan's Wake, but my dad reads it constantly, so I figure he's doing it for all of us. Your former crush certainly picked a fascinating title - I'm going to have to look that up now. I've never read any Borges, but I definitely feel I Should. I like magical realism generally.
My own still-unread books take up less than one shelf. I'm quite proud of that, though possibly I have it all wrong and it's far too many and I should be ashamed.
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