Speaking of memes…
Ah, memes. What would blogging be without memes? What, real content I hear you whisper as if it was all some great government conspiracy to keep up with our entertainment habits while keep the quality of our content low? Surely not! #
Number of Books on the Shelf
5 in the living room, 8 on the bedroom floor, 4 in the bathroom and 105 on the bookshelves. Who knows how many have been lent out, never to be returned.
Last Book Purchased
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
Book Reading Right Now
I’m reading The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell, in tandem with A Son Of The Circus by John Irving.
Last 5 Books Read
Cradle by Arthur C Clarke and Gentry Lee
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Dubliners by James Joyce
Books That Mean a Lot to Me
I must have read hundreds more books than I’ve kept, so it’s a little overwhelming knowing where to even start.
Tolkien’s works have been quite an inspiration, and I’ve read not only The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but have also managed to get through The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales.
I ocassionally terrify my bank manager by threatening to tackle the entire History of Middle-Earth.
Other authors I’ve read almost everthing by include Douglas Adams, Robert Rankin and Terry Pratchett. I’m slowly working my way through Arthur C Clarke’s immense back-catalogue, but the Odyssey series (2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001) will take some beating.
Moving away from fantasy and sci-fi, Chuck Pahlaniuk is probably my favourite contemporary author – Fight Club changed my life, and those of his other novels which I’ve read have been no less powerful. Wil Self is another favourite, alongside such diverse authors as Tom Sharpe, Corey Doctorow and Michael Crichton.
Undoubtably I’ll think of many more as soon as I click ‘Publish’.
Passing This Along To…
Martin
Jim and
Paul, if any of them have the time and/or inclination…
Most of my books are in boxes spread out between two houses, since I’m moving. I’ve got to say a couple of things, though:
- The number of books I read, and more importantly the number of books I *finish*, has gone down distrissingly in the 17 years since I discovered Usenet.
- These meme things keep springing up, and every time I find myself at a loss to determine my favourite N of anything. How do I choose the best movies or songs? Even “books that mean a lot to me” is something that to do any justice to I’d have to mentially catalog every worthwhile book I’ve ever read to see whether it “meant” more or less than some other book. Ok, granted reading The Hobbit was the first time I ever thought “hey, it’s not just the concepts, but the language he’s using that’s cool about this book”, so it’s easy to put on the list. But I have no idea what else I’d put there. If you mean “influence on my lfe”, I suppose either “The Complete Walker”, by Colin Fletcher or “Wilderness Canoeing” by Malo(?), because they started me down the trail as a hiker, backpacker and canoer. And “The Art and Technique of Soaring”, which convinced the 14 year old me that some day I was going to learn to fly (and only 30 years later, I did).
Hmmm, I see I’m going to have to think about this some.
As a side note, I see you have a live comment preview. I tried a few of the WP plugins to do taht, and I could never get them to work. Now that I see how slow they make typing, I’m sort of glad that I didn’t. Maybe it’s because of how long this comment is, but it’s pegging my CPU at 100% and making echoing really slow.
Ugh, sorry for stealing your CPU cycles! I’m not entirely sure how useful the plugin actually is, most people can see what their comment is going to look like just by reading what they type. Those who use lots of HTML generally know enough about it to know what they’re doing.
Some interesting books though, I know nothing about flying, but the fact that words on paper inspired you to do so says everything.