don't forsake him
No man can serve two masters, but behold, I can do marej and jae_w's bidding at the same time. Because they asked for the same thing!
01. Total number of books owned:
umm. Okay, here's what I can tell you: I have five bookcases*, each 3' by 6', six shelves apiece. That makes thirty shelves. One shelf just has three vases on it, and one has mostly just photo albums. That leaves 28 shelves of books. I picked a random shelf and counted 52 books on it. Let's round down to 50 for simplicity's sake. So 28 times 50 = about 1400 books, maybe. That includes textbooks, yearbooks, dictionaries, kids' picture books, and suchlike. Subtract those if you'd rather - I don't mind. It's all good.
02. The last book I bought:
You might think I would know this answer better than the previous one, but sadly, I kinda don't. I've been reading stuff online, and people have given me books, but I can't remember for sure when's the last time I paid money for one myself. I bought a retelling of Stone Soup for my nephew for his fourth birthday in February. And I bought Honor Bound from Torquere Press a while back, 'cause that author is really amazing, you know what I'm saying? But have I bought anything since then? I dunno.
03. The last book I read:
This one I do know, because I just read it a few days ago: High Society, by Ben Elton. My aunt gave this to me on the last day of my visit, and I read the first half that afternoon and the rest on the planes coming home. It was entertaining enough, fairly well paced for the quick read that it is, and not without interesting points, but it left me cold at the end. I didn't like the central politician figure enough to care much about his inevitable fate, and for the pair that had the final happy ending, I found the way they got there extremely unsatisfying - despite the supportive way Elton paints the guy, I don't think the girl was any better off with him than she was with the first one she went off with, and I don't have much hope for them together. (Is that vague enough to let me avoid a spoiler warning?)
Also, there were a lot of fairly explicit sex scenes which seemed designed to be titillating, but even the ones that weren't rape or prostitution were described in a derisive tone, as if the pleasure the characters got or hoped to get were ridiculous and laughable, and by extension the reader's pleasure in those scenes as well. And that catch-22 really irritated me. Possibly all the more because I'm so steeped in slash fandom (or at least a segment of it) where we think that enjoying sex is a good thing, and enjoying reading about sex is also a good thing, and writing sex scenes to share that enjoyment with each other is yet likewise a good thing. So, overall, I don't recommend this one for anything other than killing some time.
04. 5 books that mean a lot to me.
I got stuck here for a quite a while trying to figure out what "mean a lot to me" is really meant to mean. Like, should I say The Brothers Lionheart because I just love it so much? But I already talked about that one in the formative books meme. And in fact the same goes for many of my childhood favorites. Or should I put Lady Audley's Secret because it's one of the ones I wrote my master's thesis on, which was certainly an important thing in my life? But I don't really adore it the way I do some others. On the other hand, there are plenty of books that I really like and think are awesome and everybody should read, but that don't necessarily have, like, A Special Place In My Heart. So not those either. And is it cheating already to mention all these other things without counting them against the limit of 5? ... So I've ended up with a somewhat random list, here. Hey, man, that is my - I have to save. OKAY?? Oh, my.
Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers. I love that this book is so character-driven, despite being a mystery with a steadily progressing detective plot. And there are such great concepts voiced in it, like the idea that making fundamental errors about something and being willing to compromise on it are signs that it's not your true calling, and conversely that the thing that is right for you, you will find yourself doing fully and correctly. Also I love that Harriet becomes willing to admit that she wants what she used to think she didn't want at all, which is a situation I have some sympathy for. And what a romance it is! This is one of the two English-language novels I took with me on my study abroad year, because it bears re-reading so well.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. I almost didn't want to put this in the list, because it feels so unoriginal, sort of. Well-known classic and all, and do I have any more special relationship to this book than anyone else? No, but then, this is my list, dammit.*** So, okay. This is the other novel I took to France with me, because also with the re-reading. And the first time I read it was when I was about twelve or so, because my sister and I wanted to get a subscription to Seventeen, and the deal my mom offered us was that we could do that if we also read one "good" book each month along with the magazine. My mom didn't have really flashy parenting skills all the time, but to this day I'm still impressed by that move, and it totally worked. I love Austen, and this book especially (and I no longer read Seventeen, fwiw). And especially especially what I love is the way that whenever something happens, everyone spends a lot of time thinking about it and working out what it means and how they feel about it and how it changes their outlook. "Unpacking" it, as one of my professors used to say. Because you don't always know all that right away, you do have to think about stuff sometimes and let realizations come to you, and I just really like that combination of fine analysis and emotional churn. Also, continuing with the theme of changing your mind about what you want, and the okayness thereof. So. yes. I like this book.
Villette, Charlotte Bronte. This is one where my favorite isn't the most famous book; I like Jane Eyre, but Villette is the one that really packs the most punch for me. I like the unreliable narrator, I like that she gets to fall in love and truly get over him and fall in love with someone else in the course of one book, and I like the story that Bronte's father was insisting on a happy ending but she just couldn't bring herself to write it, as being untrue to the soul of the book, so we get this very cagey, indirect closing that's all about implications rather than revelations. Also I enjoy the little power games that Lucy plays in her fucked-up-ness, and her tendency to withdraw when faced with a rivalry rather than get involved in competing. And how she chooses to live abroad, and then if people think she's weird they attribute it to her being a foreigner, which lets her sidestep the fact that people thought she was plenty weird and outcast even in her own country. And she's feisty, yo. I love Lucy!
Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail, Jacqueline Jackson. This is a nonfiction book for kids about writing, and it's basically a big invitation, all about encouragement to join the joys of observing, journaling, focusing on the senses, overhearing things, reading, and writing. It's just lovely. Jackie Jackson lived in the same town where my family was when I was in grade school, and I wrote her a fan letter and got to meet her once, and she was just as nice in person. Also, the book quotes a lot of other books, so it works as a terrific recs list as well. And she includes bits from her own and her daughters' journals, which I like too and which in some cases have very much stuck with me; I've used a phrase from one of those excerpts as a story title (Tarnish on Bronze).
Gesammelte Gedichte, Hilde Domin. This is sort of cheating because it's the volume of collected poems, as opposed to the individual original books, but then again, I don't have those, and I do have this. My godmother, who had pretty good taste in books, gave it to me, and it's just, Domin is really compellingly emotional without being sentimental, and there's a lot about loss and emigration and exile and also about writing and words and stuff, and they're just really awesome. I love the one about being a traveler who takes a little comfort in knowing where the cups and plates are kept in other people's kitchens, and the one about a nightmare of seeing yourself being led away around a corner, and the one about the birds circling freely above the roofs while the humans cling to each other beneath. Sometimes I've tried to translate a few into English to read at the open mic I go to. I mean, This is our freedom: saying the right names. yeah.
5 people I'd like to see answer this:
Oh dear. See, I still haven't read back more than a day or two, so, yeah, I'm not sure who all has already done it. Um, remainthesame, cjmarlowe, lovelypoet, _ducks, and smallbeer. Go baby, go!
* In case anyone with a long memory and a great interest in useless information may be wondering, these are no longer all the same the bookcases I had at the time of the photo meme.** (Though they are, of course, still mostly the same books.) Viva Hoot Judkins! Hail the glories of sturdy wood and adequate shelf space! Hail!
** In the battle between being afraid of looking snobbish and being afraid of looking egotistical, the former won out. So just as an fyi: The photo posts are locked, but only so that someone from RL doesn't accidentally stumble across them and recognize me and my online porn without me knowing about it. If you're not already on my friendslist and you should for some reason suddenly really want to see what my old bookshelves looked like, I'd be more than happy to add you. Just shout, like. um. yeah.
*** Man, I am very, very tense about this. Why is that? Chilling commencing: now.
01. Total number of books owned:
umm. Okay, here's what I can tell you: I have five bookcases*, each 3' by 6', six shelves apiece. That makes thirty shelves. One shelf just has three vases on it, and one has mostly just photo albums. That leaves 28 shelves of books. I picked a random shelf and counted 52 books on it. Let's round down to 50 for simplicity's sake. So 28 times 50 = about 1400 books, maybe. That includes textbooks, yearbooks, dictionaries, kids' picture books, and suchlike. Subtract those if you'd rather - I don't mind. It's all good.
02. The last book I bought:
You might think I would know this answer better than the previous one, but sadly, I kinda don't. I've been reading stuff online, and people have given me books, but I can't remember for sure when's the last time I paid money for one myself. I bought a retelling of Stone Soup for my nephew for his fourth birthday in February. And I bought Honor Bound from Torquere Press a while back, 'cause that author is really amazing, you know what I'm saying? But have I bought anything since then? I dunno.
03. The last book I read:
This one I do know, because I just read it a few days ago: High Society, by Ben Elton. My aunt gave this to me on the last day of my visit, and I read the first half that afternoon and the rest on the planes coming home. It was entertaining enough, fairly well paced for the quick read that it is, and not without interesting points, but it left me cold at the end. I didn't like the central politician figure enough to care much about his inevitable fate, and for the pair that had the final happy ending, I found the way they got there extremely unsatisfying - despite the supportive way Elton paints the guy, I don't think the girl was any better off with him than she was with the first one she went off with, and I don't have much hope for them together. (Is that vague enough to let me avoid a spoiler warning?)
Also, there were a lot of fairly explicit sex scenes which seemed designed to be titillating, but even the ones that weren't rape or prostitution were described in a derisive tone, as if the pleasure the characters got or hoped to get were ridiculous and laughable, and by extension the reader's pleasure in those scenes as well. And that catch-22 really irritated me. Possibly all the more because I'm so steeped in slash fandom (or at least a segment of it) where we think that enjoying sex is a good thing, and enjoying reading about sex is also a good thing, and writing sex scenes to share that enjoyment with each other is yet likewise a good thing. So, overall, I don't recommend this one for anything other than killing some time.
04. 5 books that mean a lot to me.
I got stuck here for a quite a while trying to figure out what "mean a lot to me" is really meant to mean. Like, should I say The Brothers Lionheart because I just love it so much? But I already talked about that one in the formative books meme. And in fact the same goes for many of my childhood favorites. Or should I put Lady Audley's Secret because it's one of the ones I wrote my master's thesis on, which was certainly an important thing in my life? But I don't really adore it the way I do some others. On the other hand, there are plenty of books that I really like and think are awesome and everybody should read, but that don't necessarily have, like, A Special Place In My Heart. So not those either. And is it cheating already to mention all these other things without counting them against the limit of 5? ... So I've ended up with a somewhat random list, here. Hey, man, that is my - I have to save. OKAY?? Oh, my.
Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers. I love that this book is so character-driven, despite being a mystery with a steadily progressing detective plot. And there are such great concepts voiced in it, like the idea that making fundamental errors about something and being willing to compromise on it are signs that it's not your true calling, and conversely that the thing that is right for you, you will find yourself doing fully and correctly. Also I love that Harriet becomes willing to admit that she wants what she used to think she didn't want at all, which is a situation I have some sympathy for. And what a romance it is! This is one of the two English-language novels I took with me on my study abroad year, because it bears re-reading so well.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen. I almost didn't want to put this in the list, because it feels so unoriginal, sort of. Well-known classic and all, and do I have any more special relationship to this book than anyone else? No, but then, this is my list, dammit.*** So, okay. This is the other novel I took to France with me, because also with the re-reading. And the first time I read it was when I was about twelve or so, because my sister and I wanted to get a subscription to Seventeen, and the deal my mom offered us was that we could do that if we also read one "good" book each month along with the magazine. My mom didn't have really flashy parenting skills all the time, but to this day I'm still impressed by that move, and it totally worked. I love Austen, and this book especially (and I no longer read Seventeen, fwiw). And especially especially what I love is the way that whenever something happens, everyone spends a lot of time thinking about it and working out what it means and how they feel about it and how it changes their outlook. "Unpacking" it, as one of my professors used to say. Because you don't always know all that right away, you do have to think about stuff sometimes and let realizations come to you, and I just really like that combination of fine analysis and emotional churn. Also, continuing with the theme of changing your mind about what you want, and the okayness thereof. So. yes. I like this book.
Villette, Charlotte Bronte. This is one where my favorite isn't the most famous book; I like Jane Eyre, but Villette is the one that really packs the most punch for me. I like the unreliable narrator, I like that she gets to fall in love and truly get over him and fall in love with someone else in the course of one book, and I like the story that Bronte's father was insisting on a happy ending but she just couldn't bring herself to write it, as being untrue to the soul of the book, so we get this very cagey, indirect closing that's all about implications rather than revelations. Also I enjoy the little power games that Lucy plays in her fucked-up-ness, and her tendency to withdraw when faced with a rivalry rather than get involved in competing. And how she chooses to live abroad, and then if people think she's weird they attribute it to her being a foreigner, which lets her sidestep the fact that people thought she was plenty weird and outcast even in her own country. And she's feisty, yo. I love Lucy!
Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail, Jacqueline Jackson. This is a nonfiction book for kids about writing, and it's basically a big invitation, all about encouragement to join the joys of observing, journaling, focusing on the senses, overhearing things, reading, and writing. It's just lovely. Jackie Jackson lived in the same town where my family was when I was in grade school, and I wrote her a fan letter and got to meet her once, and she was just as nice in person. Also, the book quotes a lot of other books, so it works as a terrific recs list as well. And she includes bits from her own and her daughters' journals, which I like too and which in some cases have very much stuck with me; I've used a phrase from one of those excerpts as a story title (Tarnish on Bronze).
Gesammelte Gedichte, Hilde Domin. This is sort of cheating because it's the volume of collected poems, as opposed to the individual original books, but then again, I don't have those, and I do have this. My godmother, who had pretty good taste in books, gave it to me, and it's just, Domin is really compellingly emotional without being sentimental, and there's a lot about loss and emigration and exile and also about writing and words and stuff, and they're just really awesome. I love the one about being a traveler who takes a little comfort in knowing where the cups and plates are kept in other people's kitchens, and the one about a nightmare of seeing yourself being led away around a corner, and the one about the birds circling freely above the roofs while the humans cling to each other beneath. Sometimes I've tried to translate a few into English to read at the open mic I go to. I mean, This is our freedom: saying the right names. yeah.
5 people I'd like to see answer this:
Oh dear. See, I still haven't read back more than a day or two, so, yeah, I'm not sure who all has already done it. Um, remainthesame, cjmarlowe, lovelypoet, _ducks, and smallbeer. Go baby, go!
* In case anyone with a long memory and a great interest in useless information may be wondering, these are no longer all the same the bookcases I had at the time of the photo meme.** (Though they are, of course, still mostly the same books.) Viva Hoot Judkins! Hail the glories of sturdy wood and adequate shelf space! Hail!
** In the battle between being afraid of looking snobbish and being afraid of looking egotistical, the former won out. So just as an fyi: The photo posts are locked, but only so that someone from RL doesn't accidentally stumble across them and recognize me and my online porn without me knowing about it. If you're not already on my friendslist and you should for some reason suddenly really want to see what my old bookshelves looked like, I'd be more than happy to add you. Just shout, like. um. yeah.
*** Man, I am very, very tense about this. Why is that? Chilling commencing: now.