Claire tagged me. Like her, I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but this seemed more fun than usual, so here goes. I tried to track down where it started, but ran out of patience eightteen people deep.
Total Number of books I’ve owned:
In excess of twenty-five hundred. I currently have over two thousand books on hand, and the missing hundreds were mostly paperbacks that were sold while I was going to college.
Last book I bought:
Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF, Jacek Artymiak. ISBN:8391665119. Yes, it’s a geek-book for work. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to count it.
Last book I read:
I’m currently in the midst of three books. These are all ones I’ve been working on for a while, and I probably will be for a while longer.
- A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler. ISBN:0198605064. This has been my bathroom reading for almost two years. I’m making slow but steady progress through it, and learning more about our language as I go.
- The Collected Jack London. ISBN:0880295961. I read some of his works during grade school and junior high, but decided it was time to reread those, and hit the bits I haven’t read before. The bedside book when I want fiction for the past year or so.
- Terrorism and Tyranny, James Bovard. ISBN:1403963681. This is my current political read.
Last book I finished:
- Breakout, Richard Stark. ISBN:0446678252. Fun reading in the Hunter series. Hunter is the guy that Mel Gibson’s character in Payback was based on. I’m slowly working through the books when I need something simultaneously light and dark, if that makes any sense.
Five books that mean a lot to me:
This was the section that took me the longest to figure out. Books I’ve read recently are so much easier to think more of, and I know that’s just not right. There are plenty of books that “formed my brain” pretty early on that aren’t right there on the tip of my brain. Took me a few hours of rummaging around in dusty mental corners to come up with these.
- The Probability Broach, L. Neil Smith. ISBN:0765301539. This was one of my first introductions to libertarianism per se, and definitely the one that grabbed me the hardest. LNS said fairly plainly what other authors had skirted around, namely that a world where people were responsible for themselves was probably a better place than one where the government kept everyone in line.
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard P. Feynman. ISBN:0393316041. Question everything, especially Authority. The scientific approach can lead you down fascinating paths.
- The Man Who Never Missed, Steve Perry. ISBN:0441519180. A single man, using non-lethal tactics, takes on an interstallar government and brings it down. It struck a chord with me, and I continue to re-read it periodically, even though it’s far from literature.
- Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, Hunter S. Thompson. ISBN:0345410084. The first of HST’s books that I read, it fueled my appetite for more of his writing. It probably screwed up my writing for a couple years, but it was still a fun ride.
- The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff. ISBN:0140067477. It wasn’t my first foray into understanding Eastern Religion, but it was the one that cemented things clearly enough in my brain that I actually picked up a copy of Jane English’s translation of the Tao Te Ching ISBN:0679776192.