It’s my turn with the book meme.
1. Total Number of Books I Have Owned: Maybe three thousand max and I have gotten rid of half of them. When I was younger I loved to collect books. I still have a lot on display and I have read most all of them. But some of them will never be opened again. It makes more sense to make use of the library than to buy books. Especially those that you are only going to read once. Or else get them off remainder tables and pass them on when you are through.
2. Last Book I Bought: I’m expecting a delivery any day of three books. The first is Native Landscaping from El Paso to Los Angeles by Sally and Andy Wasowski and the second is The Cat Who Went Bananas by Lillian Jackson Braun. Technically the first is a birthday gift to a friend who is moving to Phoenix in a couple months. About twelve years ago I took a class at SMU by Sally Wasowski. The course changed the way I think about landscaping. Her book Texas Native Plants has become an indispensible reference. The book on desert plants is similar and I hope it will prove useful to my friends. The second is the latest in a series that Tricia got me started on many years ago. They were light reading to start with and each installment has gotten lighter, to the point where there is hardly anything there at all anymore. Nevertheless Koko and Qwill are old friends now and I have to visit with them whenever I can. The third is strictly for myself, Know Your Grasses. It’s about time I learned to tell one kind of grass from another.
3. Last Book I Read: I often am reading several at once. I don’t count technical manuals. Voice of the Coyote by J. Frank Dobie was the last book I finished. It’s a collection of tales and lore from the old West featuring the coyote.
4. Five Books That Have Meant a Lot To Me:
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Science fiction by Robert Heinlein. When I was eleven or twelve, every Saturday my father would take us to the library or to the “bookmobile” which parked in front of the local shopping center and I would check out the maximum number of books that I was allowed. That was when I discovered Heinlein’s books for boys. They became my favorites and I still remember details of them. If I have to pick out any particular one, Stranger in a Strange Land is the most memorable, probably because it’s for an older audience.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Emerson and Thoreau were required reading in high school English class. To me they represent the epitome of American values. My philosophy, politics and religion were all heavily influenced. I started going to the Unitarian church for awhile. To live like Thoreau at Walden Pond is still one of the great unfulfilled ambitions of my life.
Tender is the Night. Was it because I was a poor boy that Scott Fitzgerald always had such a hold on me? At one time my ambition was to be a psychoanalyst, which may be why this was my favorite. I wrote two different term papers on it in college.
Passing Time by Michel Butor is an obscure novel that I think of a lot. It’s about a man who takes a job for a year in a foreign country. Halfway through the year he starts his diary, only he begins writing the story from the beginning, so that he is always trying to figure out the past instead of living the present. It’s a mystery story as well as a tragic love story.
Finally I have to list something by Kurt Vonnegut. Player Piano and Cat’s Cradle are my favorites but I could include all of them.
All of this is totally arbitrary. Ask me in a month and you would get completely different answers. I can already think of another half-dozen that I could have included in the last answer.
Comments (8)
I ADORE Robert Heinlein!!!
Here is my post on the Book Meme (I’ll repeat the URL for my May 25th post, in case your commenting system does not allow html): http://thenaturenut.blogspot.com/2005/05/book-meme.html
One thing about this book meme that has me thinking in generalized terms: do the responses as a whole reflect that Bloggers are bookworms, or does it simply mean that the Bloggers who participate in book meme are the only bookworms amongst the greater populace of blogdom? Which came first the chicken or the egg? The world may never know…
I would choose to believe that most Bloggers by nature are intellectual *grin*!
I loved the CAT WHO—series, but you are right, the latest ones are all too full of what went before, and not enough MEAT! I wish they would make a TV series out of them, and cast Whats-his-name in it. OH HELL!! What IS his name…the one OH!!!!! Kelsey Gramer!! I think he would be PURRRRFECT in it!!!
Kelsey Grammer as Koko?
Robert Heinlein is a big favorite around here too but I’m still stuck on the “maybe 3,000 max”. Wow. Such a voracious reader you are.
very funny, Mr.Bill…Mary Lou is right. If Disney can do “That darn cat” w/Siamese, why not The Cat Who?
But I don’t see Kelsey as Qwill. She talks about his healthy walks & riding the recumbant bike and that luxurious mustach. Sounds more like Tom Seleck to me.
I found your website after I have been surfing the internet to be useful
Hi,
I came across your blog through surfing for bits and bobs on Michel Butor’s “Passing Time”. I first came across the book in the late 1970s; as a writer myself and also a lifelong citizen of Manchester, the books has had a double fascination for me. Recalling my pre-teenage years in Manchester in the 1950s, M Butor has the topography and the metaphysics of our ‘rainy’ city spot on. I must have read the novel over 20 times, squeezing a little bit more out of it each time. But I have come to realise that there are mysteries in it that have to remain forever unsolved: Jacques’ parting shot of something important happening on a specific day in February but he hasn’t the time to narrate it – I spent ages trying to work out that one, impossible task indeed! A few things that very much intrigue me about the novel: Throughout the full year Jacques never leaves the city – takes no trips to the countryside or seaside. He makes no reference to national events occuring outside the city. Although he procrastinates between developing a relationship with one of the Bailey sisters, Jacques’ narration never touches on the subject of sex, not even implicitly.
I’m sure much is lost in the translation; I’ve occasionally considered learning French so that I could read the novel in its original form – perhaps when I retire from work in 3 years time.
Although I left school at 15 and have worked in shitty factories all my life, I have always been an avid reader (and writer) and the French Nouveau Romanists have had much influence on me during the years I spent honing my own writing style: Nouveau Proletarian.
Anyways, nice reading of someone else who has been greatly affected by the book. I have lent it to many of my friends – they either find it extremely boring or, like self, a really intriguing read – no inbetweenies on this one.
Best regards
Michael Rowe