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Jun. 8th, 2005 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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fooliv, who has a blog located at blogfonte.blogspot.com and well, hell, everyone's doing it.
Number of Books I Own:
Assloads. I have a room devoted to books. Probably I have between one and two thousand books in my house, which is a lot of books for one person. Most of them are cheap paperbacks.
Last Book I Bought:
Burr by Gore Vidal (a present for my grandmother, who had asked for a copy of this very volume). For myself, I last bought the three liveship books by Robin Hobb (fantasy epic stuff involving pirates). They got here last week. I'm plowing through those and I expect to wind the last book up sometime this evening.
Five Books that mean a lot to me:
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. This is one of my very favorite books of all time. I reread it every six months or so because I like it so well. I've listened to it on audio book. I've read better than half of it aloud to others. This is a book that I adore and pimp at every opportunity. Consider yourself pimped. It's got turtles in it.
Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss. I like reading this book aloud. It's catchy. I am not the only person who has thought that Fox in Socks is a text with much to offer. IMHO, Seuss is underappreciated as a writer. Go. Read it aloud.
Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope. This is not technically a book, but it's delightful. I like reading it for snickery goodness. I think the bits where the form supports the content are some of the most hysterically funny writing on the fucking planet, but most other people don't think this is anywhere near as funny as I do. Also, I think a lot more people quote Pope than know they are quoting Pope, and this could be fixed if they'd just read the man. Also, it's got quite snazzy heroic couplets. What's not to like?
Holes by Louis Sacher. This is a modern juvenile novel that I am assuredly too old to be reading. It's aimed at people in fourth or fifth grade, I'd guess. It's the sort of thing I would have adored back then, had it been written when I was that age. This is such a delightful read because all the parts, each and every one of them, fall together in ways that the adult mind usually finds entirely too pat... but he sold it well enough that I didn't mind buying. The lizards, the onions, the warden, the mountain, the sneakers, the gypsy curse -- I bought it all. The (very improbable) elements in the tale were like a handful of brightly colored confetti thrown into the air that landed to form a mosaic picture of my face. It was improbable as all hell... but it could, in theory, happen. Sacher didn't make me believe that it DID happen (I'm a little more grounded in reality than that.) but he made me want to believe that it could have happened. One of the more depressing parts of being what a friend of mine once called a groan-up is that it gets a little harder, with every passing year, to believe. That's sad. Worse yet, it gets a little harder, every year, to want to believe... and that's a fucking tragedy.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. This was the first book I stopped reading and never went back to finish. I don't give a damn how it comes out and I'm pretty sure, at this point, that the reading police will not ever arrest me for failing to finish the damn thing. There have been other books I've failed to finish since then, but this one was the first. From it, I learned that I didn't have to continue to slog through dense and unamusing prose if I didn't feel the need to do so. That's a valuable thing for any reader to know, I think, and this was the book that encouraged me to learn that lesson.
fooliv, who has a blog located at blogfonte.blogspot.com and well, hell, everyone's doing it.Number of Books I Own:
Assloads. I have a room devoted to books. Probably I have between one and two thousand books in my house, which is a lot of books for one person. Most of them are cheap paperbacks.
Last Book I Bought:
Burr by Gore Vidal (a present for my grandmother, who had asked for a copy of this very volume). For myself, I last bought the three liveship books by Robin Hobb (fantasy epic stuff involving pirates). They got here last week. I'm plowing through those and I expect to wind the last book up sometime this evening.
Five Books that mean a lot to me:
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. This is one of my very favorite books of all time. I reread it every six months or so because I like it so well. I've listened to it on audio book. I've read better than half of it aloud to others. This is a book that I adore and pimp at every opportunity. Consider yourself pimped. It's got turtles in it.
Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss. I like reading this book aloud. It's catchy. I am not the only person who has thought that Fox in Socks is a text with much to offer. IMHO, Seuss is underappreciated as a writer. Go. Read it aloud.
Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope. This is not technically a book, but it's delightful. I like reading it for snickery goodness. I think the bits where the form supports the content are some of the most hysterically funny writing on the fucking planet, but most other people don't think this is anywhere near as funny as I do. Also, I think a lot more people quote Pope than know they are quoting Pope, and this could be fixed if they'd just read the man. Also, it's got quite snazzy heroic couplets. What's not to like?
Holes by Louis Sacher. This is a modern juvenile novel that I am assuredly too old to be reading. It's aimed at people in fourth or fifth grade, I'd guess. It's the sort of thing I would have adored back then, had it been written when I was that age. This is such a delightful read because all the parts, each and every one of them, fall together in ways that the adult mind usually finds entirely too pat... but he sold it well enough that I didn't mind buying. The lizards, the onions, the warden, the mountain, the sneakers, the gypsy curse -- I bought it all. The (very improbable) elements in the tale were like a handful of brightly colored confetti thrown into the air that landed to form a mosaic picture of my face. It was improbable as all hell... but it could, in theory, happen. Sacher didn't make me believe that it DID happen (I'm a little more grounded in reality than that.) but he made me want to believe that it could have happened. One of the more depressing parts of being what a friend of mine once called a groan-up is that it gets a little harder, with every passing year, to believe. That's sad. Worse yet, it gets a little harder, every year, to want to believe... and that's a fucking tragedy.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. This was the first book I stopped reading and never went back to finish. I don't give a damn how it comes out and I'm pretty sure, at this point, that the reading police will not ever arrest me for failing to finish the damn thing. There have been other books I've failed to finish since then, but this one was the first. From it, I learned that I didn't have to continue to slog through dense and unamusing prose if I didn't feel the need to do so. That's a valuable thing for any reader to know, I think, and this was the book that encouraged me to learn that lesson.
