Books Books Books

Oh dear -- I've been away for a few days and I got tagged for the infamous Book Meme.

Total Number of Books Owned: I'm afraid I can't give an accurate answer just now. See, my books are all mildew-y and I don't know yet how many will survive. At least a few hundred, I'm hoping. The paperbacks seem least affected. I've been going through them all wearing these silly purple non-latex gloves and a mask & eye shield wiping them off with bleach. Some can't be saved, but most probably can.

Last Book I Bought: Haven't bought many books lately on account of the mold problem. Must be that new collection of travel writing by Jan Morris that's sitting on the table next to my bed, and which I haven't read yet. And/or Bill Bryson's new book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything." I think I bought them both at the same time, and there they sit.

Last Book I Read: I haven't been reading very much lately, either. I think I read a few of the pieces in "Best Non-Required Reading 2005" or some such, before I loaned it to somebody. Or maybe one of those goofball 1970s mysteries by Oliver Bleeck that I found on eBay. I love those.

Five Books That Mean a Lot:

1. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I know that both Susie (of Suburban Guerrilla fame) and Fred Clark (at the highly excellent Slacktivist) named this one. Susie says she keeps getting too distracted to finish it, and I can see how that would happen. It's all about subplots. The first time I read it, I could hardly put it down even to sleep. But it's like 1400 pages long, so I did have to sleep a couple of times. Plus it's exhausting reading. You can't skim or let your mind wander for a second or you lose your place. Fred had the same impulse I did, though, which was to flip back to the front and start again as soon as he finished. I think I read it three or four times straight through when I first got hold of a copy. I read really fast, and I rarely need bookmarks, but with this book, I needed two: one to keep my place in the main text, and the other to keep my place in the extensive endnotes, which are essential if you are trying to understand what the hell is happening. It's a hilarious book, yes, but it's miles deep and also completely absurd and full of despair and hope and -- oh, just go read it.
2. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. This one totally blew me away when it was first excerpted in the New Yorker in (I think it must have been) the mid eighties. I think this is the first book I came across that made such great use of footnotes and rambling, demented digressions about nothing in particular. Had rather too much influence on my own writing, I fear.
3. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. Young adult fiction about an orphaned teenager sent from the opulent, tropical plantation where she'd been raised by her rich (but alas deeply indebted, leaving her nearly penniless when he died) and indulgent grandfather to live with her mother's sister, who had run away and married a Puritan and lived in New England. Cultural misunderstandings rule the day, and though our young protaganist is a good sport, she is clueless about household chores and protestant worship practices, among other things. I loved this book as a girl. For one thing, I moved around a lot as a kid and changed schools nearly every year, so the "girl out of place" motif resonated powerfully for me. For another thing, I read anything I could get my hands on about the colonial-era witch trials in the US, and even though this one is fiction it quickly became a favorite -- in no small part, I think, because the puritanical witch-burning mindset is just background. The author does not explain or moralize or theorize -- and you could absolutely see how such things could have happened -- in a way that nonfiction just can't show the average third- or fourth-grader.
4. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Suess. Meant a lot to me because my dad read it to me every night for years, always that one and one or two or please dad three more? It was also important to me because it was in staring intently at the pages of the book as dad recited it (he had long since memorized it, bless him) that it occurred to me that he wasn't just making shit up: the words he was saying corresponded in some way not just to the pictures but to these mysterious black shapes on the pages. I started noticing the same patterns in other books and it wasn't very long before my parents found me out & made me read the bedtime stories to them.
5. Only one more? OK. Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov. Gloriously complicated (and in certain ways profoundly dysfunctional) characters, pyrotechnical wordplay (in multiple languages). I first read it when I was too young to fully get all the truly twisted implications it presents, but I think it was the first book I read that didn't delineate "good vs. evil" in the way I had come to expect. I think I'll re-read that if the mold hasn't totally consumed it. I only have it in hardback, alas.

This meme has been around for a while, so I'm not going to tag anyone in particular. If you haven't done it yet and feel like you want to, consider yourself tagged.