miyyu's book meme

1) Total number of books owned

I actually went and counted for a few minutes and came up just shy of 500. Well, I'm sure I have a few on tour to friends and so forth... so, ~500. HLM owns a similar number, probably a bit less.

2) The last book I bought

Freakonomics by Steven (with a v!) Levitt and Stephen (with a ph!) Dubner. An economist with a weird taste in questions digs through piles of data coming up with really interesting conclusions. It's books like this and The Skeptical Environmentalist that really make me want to become a statistician so that I, too, could begin to make sense of how the world works.

3) The last book I read

Living the G.I. Diet, which I bought as a cookbook rather than a diet book (as mentioned already in my last post). I made the almond-crusted haddock last night to rave reviews, so I'm thinking it's a keeper.

By the way, it's quite unusual that the answers to both 2 and 3 were nonfiction. :)

4) Five books that mean a lot to me

I had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew by Dr. Seuss
A coming-of-age story by the master philosopher of our time.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A man in search of himself... a man with a dream of reconciling nontechnical people with technical ones by weaving it all together and making both sides see. Writing such a book would have been my life's work, if I had thought to dream so big, but Pirsig got there first and so I have no life's work. Poop. :b

Orbital Resonance by John Barnes
The very best SF coming-of-age story ever written, and indeed my favorite SF book of all time. Just incredibly good. Some people say it reminds them of a Heinlein juvenile, but I say Heinlein never nailed it like this. I may have to write a list of SF coming-of-age stories with female characters, because there are a handful of great ones, but this tops the list.

Flash Fiction edited by Thomas, Thomas and Hazuka
This is a book of 72 stories, each ~500 words. Many are incredibly good. Not only did it turn me on to short-shorts and inspire me to write one of my own, but it reminds me of a kind English teacher and a room where the light fell in like a benediction during the quiet lunch hour. After this teacher started locking the room at lunch, she started leaving it open just for me after I confessed that I used to sneak in there rather than deal with the cafeteria.

Flight to the Lonesome Place by Alexander Key
The author of Escape to Witch Mountain (also good, and also meaningful) writes an even weirder SF story about an even smarter kid who escapes the forces who want to use him, along with a little witch girl, a displaced black kid who lives off the land, and a talking... but wait, I can't tell you what Marlowe is. This book is insanely rare and I paid book-collector prices for my copy. I do let people read it, but not borrow it. So really, the only reason I wrote about this and not Escape to Witch Mountain is to annoy you.

5) Tag five people and have them fill this out on their LJs:
apfelsingail, null, null, null, null.