Books!

Book meme from foi_nefaste

1 )Total number of books owned?

I've lost track. Several hundred here. Several hundred of my own at my parents' place, several hundred more in storage. If you count my parents' schmoopy assertion that their books are my books, then close to thirteen thousand.

2) The last book I bought?


Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison

3) The last book I read?


Don't recall. I was reading about three or four at once. Did I mention I was feeling a little manic lately? A Terry Pratchett, a Bernard Cornwell (Sharpe's Company), the above-mentioned Jamison, Faulkner (Absalom! Absalom!)... I think there was one more I lost track of... Oh yeah, someone lent me The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me:

Geez. I hate this part. I can never decide. Why five? Bleh. Everyone and their cousin has already mentioned Tolkien, so I'm not sure if I should even bother including Lord of the Rings... Oh, what the hell.

1. From Anna by Jean Little. Possibly one of the formative books of my youth. A coming of age story of a little girl who doesn't fit in anywhere, Awkward Anna as she's nicknamed by her older brothers and sisters flees Germany with her family just before World War II erupts. When she arrives, a routine medical checkup reveals that Anna is almost legally blind, and will need to go to a special school and wear glasses. Faced yet again with the prospect of not belonging, Anna despairs, but finds it in her to forge a place for herself in the new country where her family has settled.

2. A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle. The whole tetralogy, actually. I'm going through the books I read as a young girl, here, because they're the ones that for the most part mean the most to me. I enjoy the books I read as an adult, but they don't resonate as much as the ones I read when I was a child: those ones have stuck with me, and I still re-read them occasionally. Anyway, these are the books that introduced me to science fiction, no matter how untechnological it was in the books. There was time travel and space travel and marvels that the human mind was unable to comprehend, all based (loosely) on science. The idea that there was a science that was beyond humans, yet to be discovered was an entirely novel concept to me at the time, and I am deeply grateful to these books for opening my mind to the idea.

3. Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt. This is the book that taught me what it means to be human. What mortality is all about. Drinking from the fountain of life isn't all it's cracked up to be, no matter what Indiana Jones might have to say about it. I'll put in a little cut-tag for a spoiler: ( spoiler! )

That book taught me that we don't always know what we want. It taught me the meaning of irony, the meaning of true greed, and the meaning of selflessness. From Anna taught me what inner strength was, and Tuck Everlasting showed me what to do with it.

4.Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. This book reduced an entire classroom of ten-year-old fourth graders to tears. All twenty-six of us. Sobbing. Like so many of the protagonists in these coming-of-age novels, Jess Aarons was me, with his flamboyant new friend, Leslie Burke, acting as a catalyst for his imagination, drawing him out of his shell and allowing him into her private world of kings and queens and dragons. I recognized a lot of my childhood games in this book, where we'd go play outside for twelve hours at a stretch in the summertime until our parents despaired of ever seeing us again, building villages in the vacant lot with our Swiss Army knives and climbing trees and making up entire countries and adventures, living in a different world entirely.

( More spoilers )

5. Damn. I've run out of slots. Well, I'm going to cheat massively, and stick two sets of books in here, namely Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia which for me fall neatly into the same category in the sense of "books that mean a lot to me." I read them both for the first time at right about the same age (when I was about eight or nine), and have been re-reading them religiously about once a year ever since, although less frequently for the Chronicles. Tolkien needs more frequent care and feeding to remain fresh. They were my introduction to fantasy, to entirely alternate worlds and religions and magic systems, and I remember that Lord of the Rings frightened me so much the first time I read it that I couldn't sleep for weeks. The journey through Mordor terrified me beyond words.

Both these sets of books taught me a lot about storytelling, as well, in vastly different ways, and mostly a lot about worldbuilding, and what it means to create a convincing backdrop for your characters, once I grew older and was able to appreciate the nuances of the books. When I was young, I was just thrilled by the stories themselves. I mostly skipped the poetry in Tolkien and got to the "good bits." ;)

5) Tag 5 people and have them put this in their journal

Nah. Tell you what: if you haven't been tagged by someone else and want to do the meme, consider yourself tagged!