Shepcat and Tim both tagged me with this book meme, and since I’ve had books on the brain a lot lately, I’ll play:
1. Total Number of Books Ive Owned
I’d like to know, but I have no way of knowing. At certain points in my life, owning a lot of books was very important to me. As I get older, I’m less concerned with how many I own and make more use of libraries. Right now, I have two book cases in my office. One is quite large and both hold many volumes (the larger one contains fiction. The smaller, but still quite big, one is mostly criticism and other non-ficiton). Both are are filled to capacity right now and I have several boxes of books stashed elsewhere that will probably get donated to charity the next time I reorganize my garrage.
2. What was the last book you bought?
No clue. Honestly.
3. Last Book Ive Read
I’m bad about being in the middle of several at a time, so before I answer the question directly, I’ll give you a rundown of what I’m reading right now. I’ve been slowly working my way through Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. Since I’m trying to find a better way to teach Hamlet and Shakespeare in general, I just checked out a few books from the library (though I’ve only read the introduction and first few pages of each): Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, and Hamlet in Purgatory. I really like Greenblatt’s work in general, so these should be a treat.
The last book-length work I actually finished was Michael Harvey’s very fine The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. I was trying to find a good book to supplement my writing classes, but this one is good I’m sure reading it helped my own writing. But if you don’t want to count how-to and/or work-related books, the last one would have been Descartes Discourse on Method, which I read because I felt guilty for never having read it previously.
4. Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes is probably my favorite novel. I liked it so much that I read the rest of Barnes’ published work and wrote my M.A. thesis on his novels. More than any other work of fiction, this one got me really curious about the nature of history (i.e. the whole field of historiography in general) and how postmodernism complicates it. That interest led me to a host of other authors (including E. H. Carr, and Carl Becker, among many others). If you like novels with a strong philosophical context, you’ll love this. If you don’t, you’ll still love Flaubert’s Parrot because it is, first and formost, a great read.
Graham Swift’s Waterland deserves mention. I like it for many of the same reasons I like Barnes’ work. This one, too, is a meditation on the nature of history, but it’s also a moving and lyrical novel. The film version is also very fine.
Richard Rorty is one of my favorite philosophers. His Philosophy and Social Hope is a good introduction to the things that interest him and is written for a general audience. For a more technical introduction, try Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. The latter book had a profound impact on my, but I think the former would have been a better starting place, had it been out at the time.
William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!
I had to put something by Faulkner on the list. It was hard to decide between this and As I Lay Dying (my first brush with multiple first-person point-of-view) or The Sound and The Fury, which is really just amazing on lots of different levels.
Albert Camus’ The Plague had a huge impact on me when I first started reading what I’d call, for lack of a better term, serious literature. Camus particular brand of existentialism (a term he found problematic) had a big influence on me for a number of years.
5. Tag Five People and Have Them Do This on Their Blog
Steve Jarvis is an avid reader and is overdue for a blog post. James Katowich is a writer and often gives me good tips on books. I have no idea what Josh likes to read (he works with me on the wB project), but I’m curious. Hell, let’s see what subversive stuff Jack‘s been reading. And, let’s send it to slacktivist, on the off chance that he’ll play ball. (I would have given this to Tim, but he beat me to it.)