The Book Meme

I got tagged by the book meme via blogger AbbaGav.

Total Number of books owned, ever:

Geez, I worked in bookstores for years, including college bookstores, so I acquired a lot. Let's see, the maximum owned at one time was like about fifteen boxes worth. Figuring about sixty books per box, that's (mumble, mumble) nearly a thousand. But I frequently sold or gave books away and acquire new ones. Wait, do comic books count?

Say maybe about two or three thousand or so.

Last Book I Bought:

I nearly bought a book yesterday on wilderness kayaking on Vancouver Island, but was able to resist. The last one bought was The Worldly Philosophers, a history of the major western economists. Pretty good stuff.

Last Book I Read:

Enemy at the Gates, about the battle of Stalingrad. The movie focuses on a very small part of the book, the snipers. The whole book is a must-read to understand the level of the military catastrophy on the part of the Germans, and the beginning of the Soviet army steamroller that almost overran all of Europe.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

1984, by George Orwell. Duh, look at my alias. I've read this book so many times that I've worn out two before buying it in hardback. Made a very deep impression on me when I first read it at age fourteen, and it has guided my politics ever since.

Animal Farm, by George Orwell. When revolutions go wrong. This book is often waved in the faces of socialists by those who don't understand that it's a devastating socialist critique of Marxist-Leninism, written by a socialist.

Down and Out In Paris And London, by George Orwell. Starving to death in two of the world's greatest cities, and Orwell's first book.

Maus, by Art Spiegelman. No account of the holocaust has been more real to me than this account. The sense of being there is masterful, especially as told through a character that is not particularily heroically portrayed (Spiegelman's father). Gut wrenching. Plus, has cute mice!

Neuromancer, by William Gibson. The definitive cyberpunk novel. Another book that I have read to death several times.

And I'll take a pass on passing it on. Feel free to post your own list should you feel the urge.