Dichroic Reflections

book meme

Nobody has tagged me for this < / unjustified pouty lip > But books are such a large part of my life that I'll do it anyway.

Total number of books owned: Estimated around 1500, might be a little higher (the SF paperbacks are not yet catalogued).

Last book bought: Freakanomics, for a gift. Last bought for me, a whole boxful from Amazon, largely fantasy of one sort or another, ranging from Mark Helprin to Garret Weyr to Zenna Henderson. Last book to enter the house and plan to stay there, The Balloon Man _ thanks, L'Empress!

Last book read: Last one finished, Freakanomics. (Shut up, you know you read gift books too.) Currently in progress, Zenna Henderson's Ingathering: The Complete People Stories and Joseph Ellis's bio of Washington, His Excellency.

Five books that mean a lot to you: This is the hard one. Actually, maybe it's not so bad, since it's not asking for the *only* five, or five that mean the most. Here are five that matter or mattered, but in some cases I can't separate books from series. Also, I'm going to list six, just because that's how it worked out:

• The Poky Little Puppy, because that's the one I demanded to have read over and over, until one day I tried to fool my mother by telling her I could read it, when I had actually only memorized it. I don't think real reading lagged much behind - if you know what certain-shaped words on a certain page say, and you know those symbols are meant to be words, reading isn't far off.
• The Danny Dunn books: Reading for the protogeek.
• The Magnificent Barb: I loved Black Beauty, too, and later read most of the Black Stallion books, but the Magnificent Barb was something no one else I've ever met knows about (except maybe Mom, since I inherited it from her) as if someone had written a book just for me. I don't know where that old copy is - either at my parents' or disintegrated - but I recently found another copy. It's still an odd, dreamy sort of book.
• Madeleine L'Engle's Meg Murray and Vicky Austin books, Norma Johnston's Keeping Days and Glory in the Flower series, and Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong and Dragonsinger. Not to say I didn't have friends as a teenager. I did. In general, though, we talked about boys and school and clothes and generalities. As I got older there were more with whom I could discuss books and science and college and futures. But it was those books I went to to really feel understood.
  
• Robert A. Heinlein's Number of the Beast: When my brother won a copy in a grade-school math contest (awarded by a teacher who must not have actually read the book!) and brought it home, I read it and that's what got me into Heinlein and then into general SF. Before that, my science fiction reading was mostly limited to Isaac Asimov and the kids' books like Danny Dunn, and my fantasy to McCaffrey and kids' books with magic in them (which I still read) but for some reason I didn't branch out further.
• Dorothy L. Sayers' Peter Wimsey mysteries: I didn't read these until I was in my early thirties. By then, Rudder and I had well established our relationship, but Sayers put a lot of it into words for me, as well as the related ideas about Proper Jobs. (As I said recently to Natalie, there's a lot of parallel in the idea of whether one has one true love and one Proper Job.) Also, at least half the online friends I've made are originally from discussing those books, either directly or by following links.