to bring you a book meme. I was tagged by the fabulous and fashionable
Anna for my very first meme! Thanks, Anna! And I'm going to start
Cold Comfort Farm when I am done with my diss...
1)Total number of books in your house:Hmm. Based on averaging a couple of shelves' worth and multiplying by the total number of shelves, I've got maybe 600 in the house. That's not including all the books I still have at my parents' though, or the ones in my study cube at school. Maybe 750 total?
2)The last book you bought was:Non-Fiction--
Scarf Style. So pretty. Soon I will knit many scarves from it.
Fiction--
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. LOVED IT. Susanna Clarke totally nails the 19th-century novel without being pretentious or twee about it. I actually bought this as an audiobook and listened to it when I drove home for Christmas--a 26-hour drive (I won't fly because I refuse to pack Bailey into the cargo hold of a plane, where she would probably die from heat or cold or [most likely of all] fright). Luckily it is an immensely long book and comes out to, I think, 38 hours or so of audio, so I not only got a lot of drive time out of it, but also a lot of knitting time. I am a big fan of knitting to audiobooks, since I haven't yet quite mastered simultaneous reading and knitting.
3)What was the last book you read before reading this?Never ask a dissertating grad student this question. Officially, the last book I read was
No More Separate Spheres!: A Next Wave American Studies Reader. But you don't want to know about that. What you want to know about is
Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Right? Or maybe
Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire?
Dissertating really cuts into the whole reading-for-pleasure thing.
4)Write down 5 (or 6) books you often read or that mean a lot to you.1)
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. Total comfort food--I often just read a chapter here and there before I fall asleep, and I always read the Christmas chapter at Christmas, especially if I am feeling grinch-y. I love the drawings as much as the words, I think.
2)
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. Not comfort food at all--totally unsettling, in fact, but I love Wharton's ability to be ruthlessly unsentimental about and completely unsparing of both her heroine and her society. 19th century New York was a bitch, man.
3)
Emma, by Jane Austen. (Austen? You're shocked, I'm sure.) This one gets better every time I read it, and while I think Austen is more forgiving of Emma than Wharton is of Lily Bart, she's still pretty sharp. But it all comes right in the end, doesn't it? Everyone to their appointed places in society... (I also adore this book's contemporary male avatars,
About a Boy and
High Fidelity, both by Nick Hornby)
4). The His Dark Materials trilogy, by Phillip Pullman. Gorgeous and dark--like Harry Potter plus the Chronicles of Narnia divided by atheism and quantum physics. Technically these are children's books, but I don't know how well I would have handled them as a child. Love them now though. Also, I hope trilogies/series aren't cheating, because
5) Dorothy Dunnett's The House of Niccolo series. Basically I am a big huge nerd and loooove historical fiction, and this is historical fiction at its best, I think--meticulously researched, engagingly told, and completely addictive. There are 8 long books in this series. I've read through it twice (the first time, they were the only non-school-related books I read for almost a whole year), and am so looking forward to reading it again. Although why I don't just throw my hands up and go to Renaissance Faires instead I'm sure I don't know.
And 6)
The Other End of the Leash, by Patricia McConnell. If you have a dog, you really, really need to own this book. I don't think I would have gotten through my first couple of Bailey-months without it. It's not a training book, per se, although it does have training tips; it's really more about how we relate to and communicate with dogs physically. It all seems so obvious once you read it (Hey! dogs don't have hands, or talk! So they don't really understand you when you shout and wave your hands at them!), but it was revelatory for me. Plus, here is the picture on the front.
Now I am totally going to cheat and just mention the books I have read pretty recently (in the past year, say) that I think you should read:
The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffeneger (sad and beautiful);
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, by Mark Haddon (uncanny in its evocation of autism);
Rats, by Robert Sullivan (gross but fascinating);
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini (brutal, spare, enlightening);
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller (how glad am I that my childhood did not involve automatic weapons?);
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (the epic and the domestic in one body).
5)Who are you going to pass this onto and why?I will pass to
Cordelia and
Vicki, who are kind enough to comment here regularly, and Shelby, who has been reading since I started blogging. (If they want it, that is--no pressure.) And Shelby, if you want to play, I'm especially interested to know what books you absolutely cannot wait to read to Appleseed!
Ooh, update, because I am an idiot and did not notice that Anna tagged Vicki too. Instead, I am tagging
Sydney, because I want to know what they are making the kids read in college these days. And because she liked His Dark Materials.
Duh. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she knocked her Uncle Marc ass-over-teakettle at the park this morning)
My fam: me, my sister, my brother-in-law, and parents. Marc took that picture so he's kind of included.
