"Mom, I'm down at the station being booked!"

Been tagged by Nancy for the bibliophile's meme... Yeh, I didn't pay close enough attention. Let's see... Oh yeh, "Book Tag" or something... Nancy and her tagger call it (very creatively--heck, they're writers, for heaven's sake!) "Meme! Pick Meme!" Just the image I've had as this one passed me by and passed me by again... :-) OK, here's the thing. I'll follow the rules, but I'm going to take a sidestep on this thing, a kinda Ozarkian line dance thingy. Rules: How many books do I own? Latest book purchased: Last book read: 5 Books that mean a lot to me: 5 new "victims" ADDITION: Take the top name/link off the list below. Add your blog (with an embedded link) to the bottom of the list and paste the blognames/links into your post. I found in the "Childhood Meme-ory Lane" thing that the linking helped me follow the tagline. I really enjoyed (and still and enjoying as it continues to spread) following that one. I think following this one may well lead me to some new books I will want to read and this will make following it easier. So, here's my answer to the above. 1. Mitchieville 2. The Glamazon Shoe Diaries 3. regurgitation 4. Soliloquy... one writer's thoughts 5. third world county How many books do I own? Oh, man. A couple of thousand? Most are shuffled in and out of boxes, in various bookshelves, on tables, floors, nightstands, and hidden in various nooks and crannies. Many more, of course, have shuffled through my hands over the years. A friend and I once considered pooling our libraries and starting a used books store (back when I had even more books), but neither of us could bear to "cull" enough from our own shelves to make it happen, so... Latest Book Purchased An eBook (also available in print) by P.N. Elrod, Siege Perilous. Interesting conclusion (?) to his ethical vampire series. A light, entertaining read. Though well-written, probably a "read once" though well worth the $4 eBook price. Last Book Read The Man Who Knew Too Much, G.K. Chesterton. I'd actually looked for this from time to time in various libraries and bookstores. Have it as an etext from Gutenberg.org, now. 5 Books that mean a lot to me The two-volume dictionary set that I used to use (still do) for backup reading when I had devoured what was available. Dictionaries are good reads! The plots and characterizations are a little thin, but lotsa good words. The Bible. Where else can one find such a wealth and variety of reading? Cracking good stories. Villains, heroes, an ever-present God. Evil battling good. Failure become triumph. Mystery, romance, poetry, history, philosophy, law... Always fresh, always challenging. Just spare me some of the recent lame "translations," please. The O.E.D. I used to spend literally hours and hours reading this work when I had access to a library that had it in its collection. What an engrossing tale of the development of the English language one can find in its pages! Wonderful reading! The Lord of the Rings I first read this more than 40 years ago. Reread it enough thereafter to wear out my first copies of the trilogy. I'm not a LOTR "fan" so much as I am a Tolkien "fan," I suppose. His epic view and, well, bardic sensiblities are simply wonderful. Macbeth Yeh, not a "book" except in the sense that one talks of a play as a "book." Actually, my two different "Collected Works of Shakespeare" might be a better statement of favs/mean-a-lots. But Macbeth is my fav of all the plays. I love mangling Act IV, scene 2, lines 91-92... (though some versions list the lines as 85-86). Of course, I don't know how I can not mention Departmental Ditties and Barrackroom Ballads (Kipling) or The Encyclopedia of Philospohy or Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais) or, or, or... Too many really good reads. Too, too many. Now, who am I gonna tag... hmmm... Kris, at Anywhere But Here, cos I just know she has sooooo much spare time on her hands. LOL Rich at The English Guy. I mean, this is one interesting guy. I wanna know what he reads. Diane of Diane's Stuff cos I'[ve already had some hints of what might make her reading list and I want more. :-) Christine of Morning Coffee & Afternoon Tea. I know about Christine's tastes in movies, chocolate, tea and coffee. How about books? Dan Riehl of Riehl World View, cos he's tagged me twice and blown off a couple. 'Bout time he ponied up— Big. :-) There ya bes. My list of favs/mean-a-lot-to-mes is terrible. To get it "right" I'd have to limit it to a hundred or so, and the priority ranking would never be the same from one moment to the next. Where's Twain, today? Henlein? Aeschylus? Pournelle? (Strategy of Technology —written with Stefan Possony and Francis Xavier Kane is a must read for folks who want a poly-sci-techno grasp of the 70 Years' War with the Soviet Union... and its aftermath.) Addendum: I've had comments and email that spur me to note this link to the Baen Free Library. Folks who like reading sci-fi will find lots to love there. Here's a snippet from the intro to the place: Introducing the Baen Free Library by Eric Flint Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed.)... While I own print copies of most of the books in the Baen free Library, some I do not... yet. I've found several new-to-me authors there, and usually ended up buying print versions of their books. I might not have picked up a book by Holly Lisle in a bookstore and given it a serious look, but Sympathy for the Devil pretty much made an HL fan out of me. A few seem to be "one book wonders" but only a very, very few. Most are books from well-established authors. Worth a look if you appreciate sci-fi. The, of course, anyone who loves to read, learn and expand their horizons needs to bookmark and USE the Project Gutenberg site. Something on the close order of 16,000 free electronic books (eBooks) available (nearly 10,000 in English, alone!). Public domain works, so most of them are 75 years and more old. So if you think a book has to be new to be worth reading, just walk on by... Any number of etext readers are available—for free—but I just read all my eBooks in my Opera web browser.