In which the Decline of Western Civilization is probably (not) hastened, and there is much discussion of books

OK, Jess is rapidly becoming the Very Important Guest Star of this blog. Or, like, the Lucifer of my Paradise Lost. I will endeavor not to give her ALL the good lines. Because I want to be my OWN damned antihero! Um... no pun intended.

There is a thing in the ether-world, I am given to understand, called a meme. This is basically a direction, or set of directions, distributed amongst ether-friends, to entertain themselves and/or each other. If one is ordered (or, more politely, requested) to participate in said meme, one is said to have been "tagged."

So: Jess has tagged me to do the following meme, which I'm going to call The Book Meme:

1. Total number of books I've owned:

I'm going to have to go with thousands. Right now, there are around 400 books in my living room (I know because there's a library-cataloging program I've started using to keep track) and probably about three times that many in my office (based on the comparative shelf and books sizes). I gave away many many boxes of books before I moved to Los Angeles, and there are still a few in my mom's basement and in my Aunt Loretta's house. Boxes, not books.

2. Last book I bought:

The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. It was 40% off, and has the potential to attract legions of Dan Brown/Anne Rice fans, which means that, despite the huge initial print run, the first edition may some day be worth something. If not, at $15, it was no more expensive than my eventual paperback purchase would have been.

3. Last book I read:

I haven't been reading much, lately. I've been pretty work-busy and a little brain dead. One recent weekend, however, I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans and Holly Black's Valiant within about 24 hours of each other.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

Seriously, five?? Um, here are some... sets of books that mean a lot to me.

a) The Harry Potter Books. I put them first because I realize that their importance to me is actually relevant to the putative theme of this blog, i.e. travel and discovery and the consumption of culture. So: I bought the first Harry Potter book in February of 1999, in Chicago, three days after my dad died, and read it in one escapist sitting. The second book came out in the U.S. shortly before I was leaving for Africa, Ireland, and the U.K., and I read it in the passport office while I waited to pick up my passport. The third book came out in the U.K. a couple of weeks later, while I was in Edinburgh (and had more or less just successfully taught myself to drive a stick shift... on the wrong side of the road), so I read it well ahead of the groundswell of U.S. fervor. The fourth book came out when I was in Europe the following summer, and, briefly stranded at Charles de Gaulle, I yielded to temptation and read it in one of the airport's on-site hotel cubby things (not as scary as the Japanese sleep-pods, but slightly smaller than a bedroom in a low-rise ten-man, for the reference of those who went to school with me). The fifth book came out while I was traveling for two weeks for a business trip, and was waiting for me when I got home. The sixth book will come out while I am in China. It will also be waiting for me when I get home, but I'm wondering if I won't just cave and buy a copy in Hong Kong. It seems likely.

b) The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn, My War Gone By, I Miss it So by Anthony Lloyd, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch. Three stupefyingly well-written and compelling accounts of the worst (with occasional flashes of the best) possible purposes humanity can decide to get up to.

c)The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Absalom, Absalom. Because we might be a nation of callow, gun-toting idiots, but by god, we can create some literature that's just as damn good as anything in the history of ever.

d)The President's Daughter by Ellen Emerson White, Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, and Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler. The first told me who my friends were, the second made me want to be an English major, and the third is the book I wish I'd written.

e)The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, and Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. Because Beautiful Prose and Ripping Yarns/Genre Fiction don't always just have to stare distrustfully at each other across a chasm of Critical Regard.

5. Which five people would you most like to see fill this out in their blogs?

I will come back to this question once I figure out a)if I know five people with blogs and b)how to do that hyperlink thing that links to them.

ETA: Hee. The spellchecker wants me to replace "i.e." with "IEEEEE" which seems... hilariously alarmist.