Just another meme

A bow to Jozet, who tagged me on this one.

1. Estimate the total number of books you've owned in your life.

Oh. My. God. Do I have to count the collections of Golden Age Science Fiction and of Erotica which I sold after I got out of college and just before law school respectively because I needed the money? The dirty books made me more money than the science fiction, it must be said.

Do I count jointly owned books? All my children's books were jointly owned and all my books now are jointly owned. My children now own a fair number of my children's books, come to think of it.

And all the books I trashed reading them in the tub and writing in the margins? And the ones I bought and then returned to the Book Nook a week later to trade in on new ones? Do I count the ones I never read or started and tossed?

The stripped copies I used to get by the box from my pals who worked at the bookstore?

In my life? Oh dear.

I have been alive and literate, let's see, on the order of 2 thousand weeks as I figure it.

I want to say a million, since the number of books I have owned seems to me to rival the number of stars in the sky or grains of sand on a beach. Why I have not had to build a whole new house to accommodate them I have no idea. I surely could build a house out of them, should the End Times be closer than we had thought.

But realistically, I would call it about 20,000.

2. What's the last book you bought?

For myself? Or for anybody?

For myself, I recently bought "Q" which is pretty good but slow going; and "The Birth of Venus" which is a nice historical fiction bit of fluff. I also stole a biography of Rasputin from my father when we were in the States.

I bought "The Visitor" and "The DaVinci Code" for Dearly Beloved, the latter because he wanted to read it in English.

Okay, I did not buy "the DaVinci Code", I stole it from my mother. Er, I mean, I mistakenly put it in my suitcase and was aghast to discover it when we got back to Holland, yeah.

Well, I am bringing it back in July, geez.

3. What's the last book you read?

I am now rereading the Rasputin biography and last night I reread the Mists of Avalon becasue I was not up to any nonfiction. I do a lot of rereading these days, as my options for English language books are limited.

4. List 5 books that mean a lot to you.

They all do, I am a reading Don Juan, eternally in love with whatever I am reading at the moment. (Well, as long as we are on the subject of erotica, I suppose a reading Juliette, as I am not seducer but seduced....).

I enjoy reading the side of a box of cornflakes as much as the most scintillating prose, though the cornflakes rarely give me anything to talk about afterwards so I rarely mention them. But I found out which ones I really wanted to keep when we moved and I had to get rid of a lot of stuff. That's when you find out what you cannot live without -- when you have to pay to have it shipped halfway around the world.

1) My OED. I am still limping along with the two volume condensed and will someday own the edition which takes up an entire bookshelf -- is it 12 volumes now? But I love my OED and its little magnifying glass. I also love my Yale Shakespeare especially since I got it at the Book Nook for nearly nothing.

2) My copy of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". I love Uncle Bob, even if he only has three male characters and two female characters which he recycles endlessly. And the female characters all have huge tits (except one) and are eternally beautiful and have IQs over 200 and are improbably even tempered and submissive. I don't care, I love Uncle Bob anyway.

3) All my Ted Sturgeon. I don't care if he's not fashionable.

4) "The Cornucopia" a collection of recepts and cooking lore from 1390 to 1899.

5) "The Phantom Toolbooth" and "Three Men in a Boat" come in as a tie for fifth.

My spouse could no doubt add to this list should he read it, he probably remembers which books I agonized over and which ones I tossed without a qualm better than I do. I generally block out traumatic experiences.

6. Tag 5 people!

Sorry, Joze, I don't pass on forwards, I am the end station of all chain letters, electronic and otherwise, and I don't tag people for memes.

Though I would pay large sums to find out sue's answers to these, and actually also my spouse's answers -- but he doesn't even have a blog.