reasonablenut

Cowboy Blob was nice enough to tag me with the book meme that's been circulating for several weeks.

I have to say that these are some tough questions, and I devoted more thought to this than I cared to, but here goes.

1. Total Number of Books I Own. This is very tough to answer. It is at least in the hundreds. I'm still a renter and have moved so many times that books and DVDs tend to get left in boxes in anticipation of the next move.

Additionally, much like guns, my father's collection and mine tend to be in intermingled. Case in point, my mother wants me to go through a shitload of boxes I've had at my parents house for the last 12 years. These date back to high school and consist of the weird shit I bought in high school (Artaud, Corso, etc.) and classics I ripped off from the old man (Faulkner, Joyce, etc.)

2. Last Book I Bought. The last book I bought was Precision Shooting at 1,000 Yards. It is a collection of essays on long range precision target shooting and covers everything from varmint hunting to reloading.

3. Last Book I Read. My parents and I have been doing a discussion group on Joyce's Ulysses for the last couple of months. We read a chapter a week and then discuss before dinner on Sunday nights. We have also supplemented it with Stanley Sultan's The Argument of Ulysses, which is one of the more useful critical works on the subject, though somewhat hard to find in decent shape as it was published by Ohio State University Press, which only did several runs (if not a single one.)

We fell a little behind, as my mother is a grade school teacher, and, at least perceives, she falls behind towards the end of the school year.

Before that the last book I completed reading, was Sometimes a Great Notion.

4. 5 Books That Meant a Lot to Me. This was the tough nut. It's not "favorite books" or "most influential books" it's "books that meant a lot to me."

Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was my bible in my high school days. Wasted youth, sex, alcohol, etc.

Catch-22 was probably the book that has ever had the most emotional impact on me.

Light In August I always though had the most beautiful first chapter ever written before it slips into the Faulknerian (sic?) hell that so many of his novels do. Of course, someone may truncate the ending now that it's made Oprah's book club.

Ray Bradbury's Halloween Tree used to be read annually and still gets a glance once in a while. If the old man were doing this list Dandelion Wine would no doubt supplant this as far as books that meant a shitload.

Lastly, the token political book. Walter E. Williams' More Liberty Means Less Government. This is the book that I credit with making me the right-wing wacko I am today, or at least provided the final coffin nails. I was a fiscal conservative long before I was a gun-owner.

5. Tag 5 People. I am going to cheat on this one and only reference two and a half. Kirk at Limpidity (because we've never really discussed this sort of thing and it appears he's having technical difficulties, so why not pile on?) and Joe of Boomershoot fame, just because I'm dying to know what kind of shit that guy reads. Lastly, the old man of ReasonableNut who occassionally posts, but contributes all the time. That's just because he agreed that 4. was a tough question, but didn't answer.