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Meme tagging: Books

1. Estimate the total number of books you’ve owned in your life.

I’d say there are roughly 6000 books lurking around the house. A trillion years ago I read Mills & Boons and when I gave them away finally there were 486 ~ and in those days you handed two books into a second-hand book store to get one. And then there was the discovery of Better Books, a credit card hell where the owner only gets second-hand books in that are on his discerning list, NOT just anything. And then there was the discovery of the safeness of ordering from Amazon. And the collection of uteral feminist books from Exclusive Books back when I was studying. Yip, I need a bigger house.

2. What’s the last book you bought? Can one operate in the singular when finding oneself in a book department?

I really only read the books on palmistry and feminism, the others I just put my eyes onto the words.

Macho Sluts by Pat Califia
The Pythons by Graham Chapman
Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex by Pat Califia

3. What’s the last book you read?

This definitely goes down in the singular, especially since the implication is that I read the book in it’s entirety. I read mostly non-fiction, so at different points I read different bits of books. Many fiction books lie around the house in the process of being read and rehoused.

The Book of Palmistry by Nathaniel Altman

4. List 5 books that mean a lot to you.

Tricky...

The Cider House Rules by John Irving I have read this book more than any other. Every time I read it I discover new layers of metatext that I missed the previous times. (Another way of looking at this is that I have a sieve for a brain and in each reading I reread and think it’s new.) I stopped counting the amount of times I had read it about 10 years ago and then it was 10, but I read it roughly once a year. What appeals to me is the fact that much happens to Homer, little is directed by him. The Little Prince in Maine. This aspect attracts me to all of Irving’s books.

A Feminist Dictionary by Cheris Kramarae, Paula A. Treichler This ‘almost cuntionary’ is more a dictionary of concepts. The almostness is described in the foreword. The inextricability of language and thought is a basic principle in my thinking and this book is evidence. Each word is given it’s context and a woman is credited with creating or re-creating it’s meaning. My reference to all things feminist.

Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter Many of my values were lifted wholesale from childhood books, with only slight modifications made as the years passed ~ tweaks if you will. One of my pet peeves is the negativity of the spoilt. They need a good smack in my opinion. I have taken the glad game and installed it into my thinking pervasively. Heidi by Johanna Spyri also made contributions to this phenomenon.

The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis I really believed there were magical worlds just out of sight. Waiting to be bumped into. Damn, I hate real life.

5. Tag 5 people!

I wish I had people to tag. This is the result of picking up someone tagging her friend on the Internet. I am a voluntary (secret) taggee.

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