| | I accept your challenge and reply to it in kind:
1. Number of books I own:
About 40 here and about 850 at home.
2. Last book I bought:
From the Bush: The Front Line of Health Care in a Carribbean Village by Marsha B. Quinlan, a book for cultural anthropology.
3. Last book I completed:
An Early History of Craniotomy: From Antiquity to the Napoleonic Era by Louis Bakay. Sounds like a book that I'd possibly make up, but it's real in all its medieval-line-drawing glory. Very nice, specific drawings of ancient perspectives of the mind/soul represented as vessels of wisdom sprouting from the head and heart. I read it for a paper, and it had some strange information on trepanation.
4. Books that mean a lot to me:
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware. Nowhere near as self-complementary a book as the title would lead you to believe - the life of a man as he goed through his daily routines and comes to meet his father who wasn't around for his childhood. From a wider view, it's the story of three generations of lonely, awkward men who are all named Jimmy Corrigan. Beautiful drawings and moving characters. I have read very few books that have a story this encompassing and realistic.
The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death by Daniel Manus Pinkwater. I first found this book in my elementary school library and picked it up because it had a crudely, marker-drawn picture of the main characters on the cover and had a gold sticker claiming it had won the (fake) Leonard Prize for Literature (in the style of those Caldecott Award winners). The books tells the tale of three mature kids living in the city who like to stay up late to watch obscure movies at a theater, meeting different residents of the community. More like Kerouac than Amelia Bedelia. This book was one of the first books that I read that felt like it came from the wavelength where I reside.
Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. While not his most famous book (Slaughterhouse Five), this books is one of Vonnegut's best. His usual cast of characters is here, including a World War II veteran, an artist, and a large family. Absurdly touching in parts.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and More by Roald Dahl. It's hard not to like the stories of Roald Dahl. Henry Sugar is more of a recollection of Dahl's days in World War I and some descriptions of other events, both creative and bizarre, than his writing in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This book probably came as somewhat of a bridge from my reading of books targeted to kids or the youth audience to reading books that target anyone else.
Other books/writers:
Saul Bellow
Emily Dickinson
Dave Eggers
Edgar Allan Poe
Jack Kerouac
Marcel Proust
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
5. What I'm currently reading:
Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Just starting this to read about Godel and his incompleteness theorem for a paper later on.
6. Books I hate:
The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Maybe it was the age when I read it, but this is one of the only books where I actively disliked the protagonist (when that didn't seem to be the author's intent).
I am tagging the world at large, I suppose. Tag. You're IT.
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| | Posted 10/4/2005 1:01 AM - 26 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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