Thursday, June 09, 2005

Full shelves

Got tagged by Mark of the Biomes Blog for the book meme that's going around. (I think I got the nod from someone else when TVB was on hiatus. Jovi, was that you? Sorry!)


Number of books I own: Oh, boy. Hard to estimate. Approaching 1,000, but that's a wild guess.

Last book I bought: Bought these three at the same time:

>>Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, an epic novel about a Greek immigrant family's experience in the United States; sprawling and fascinating. Here's the first sentence: "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." How can you not keep reading after a sentence like that? The first page is here.

>>Erik Larsen's Devil in the White City, a nonfiction account of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which, believe it or not, was plagued by a serial killer. Reads like a novel. The first page is here.

>>Ian McEwen's Atonement (a novel; haven't read it yet).


Last book I read (for the first time): Middlesex.


Comfort reading: I don't know how "comforting" it is, but the book I find myself rereading the most would be Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a bleak yet somehow hopeful science-fiction classic I first read in high school. It still holds up. Please don't read the sequel. Ugh.


Five books that mean a lot to me:

>>Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Simple, and very moving. The first page is here.

>>Other than Middlesex, the one book that just knocked me for a loop in the last few years would be Nicholas Christopher's A Trip to the Stars. It's hard to describe, so read the Publishers Weekly write-up on the Amazon page linked here. It's about identity, and fate, and coincidence, and features some of the most poetic writing I've read in a long time.

>>Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth. This was probably most responsible for getting me hooked on reading when I was a kid. I kept taking it out of the library over and over.

>>Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury's writing hasn't aged terribly well, IMO, but he was my favorite writer when I was a teen. I read everything of his I could get my hands on.

>>Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book. Why? Because it's 90 freaking degrees out, that's why.

I'm supposed to pass this on to other people, but I think I'm the last person to do this, and Freddie the Dog isn't much of a reader.


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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I actually came "this close" to tagging Freddie, just to see what would happen.

Anonymous said...

Yes, that was me, sorry 'bout that.
And I think you should tag Freddie, I'd be really curious to see his answers.
(has he ever read The Cat In The Hat?)

Jim Donahue said...

No, but he likes "Harry the Dirty Dog."

Anonymous said...

Go, Dog. Go!