Book Meme

I've been tagged for another booke meme. Twice, actually, though I didn't catch the first one because I was traveling, via 201K. And now by Kevin Powell.

Number of books I own: Hmm. I'm not sure how to answer this, since I'm not sure exactly what books I own (vs. the books my sister or parents own) nor do I have access to all my books right now for counting purposes. But taking a Fermi-estimate stab, I'll guess 800. A lot of that stems from the fact that I rather like to keep textbooks, and I have a lot of them.

Last book I bought: Um, this is is somewhat predictable. Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican. We could only crane our necks for so long, you know.

Last Book I read: Fury, by Salman Rushdie.

Books That Mean A Lot To Me. Oh boy. That's really tough, because there are too many. I'm not going to interpret this as a top five kind of thing, though, and I'll leave out obvious and "most important" ones. (Kevin, a Lutheran Pastor, cites The Bible; I'm leaving out The Gita--that should help you calibrate the differences in our approach.)

Genius, by James Gleick: The biography of Feynman was influential not so much in its portrayal of Feynman, but in its portrayal of the culture of theoretical physics. There's a lot of texture in this book.

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok. It was assigned in 8th grade and I finished it the day I got it. It was revealing in its ability to open up a fairly alien world to me at an age when I could particularly relate to the characters. So reading it was a real literary experience in the sense of feeling connected to a universal human condition. It was also sort of moving in its description of theology as a precise, careful, but inspired practice. This is on Kevin's list as well, interestingly.

The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. Easily the best book I had to read in college, and by far the most optimal combination of difficult and rewarding. It's such a detailed map of culture and philosophy and psychology, and a poignant rendering of the struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies. Whether you read it as an allegory or a description of its times, it's really ideal novel, I think. It fed my affection for the shattering of overly rigid dichotomies.

War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. I read this when I was just starting out at Columbia. It's a short little book, concise, gruesome, and very intelligent. Hedges has had the sort of horrific journalistic experiences with war that dinners honoring War Correspondents can't help but romanticize, and Hedges delves into that romantization and its roots in the addictive nature of war. His concrete, bloody descriptions of modern upheavals and socio-politics are informed and illuminated by deep reflections from the Bible and the Iliad.

In the Skin of a Lion, by Michael Ondaatje. This was a novel that sort of blew me away. It's not that the story is so fundamental and universal as my other favorite novels--To Kill a Mocking Bird, Bleak House, The Great Gatsby--nor that it was small and simple and simply executed very well. It was medium, exactly right, less than a man's life, but more than an incident--clearly, it was the story that the main character would tell of his own life, with all the right amount of intersections with supporting characters. And it was executed so very well. The shifting points of view and perfectly necessary nonlinear narration, the lyrical descriptions, the rousing action--it all renewed my faith in the novel. No bloodless prose here.

Tag: Five more! Wow that's a lot. They may not like it, and I haven't been a good enough blog reader lately to make sure they haven't already done it, but here goes: Zwichenzug, The Super Six Sepia Mutiny Crowd, (one of them should bite, right?), Thennavan, Climateboy, and the literary Indeterminacy.

Update: Thennavan passes, Indeterminacy has already done it (and provides some more great titles in the comments) and Zwichenzug takes up the challenge. Update II: Renee takes the initiative with a list that may send me to the bookstore and Thennavan puts out the mother of all memes. Taran at KnowProse also has a neat list.