LyfLines: Book meme

Responding to the "book meme" wandering the blogosphere: (I got it from Chris Lynch - A Large Regular)

Number of books

Many. Very, very many. I have floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in 4 different rooms in my house, smaller bookshelves scattered about, and stacks everywhere. A lot of them are kid's books, but my no means a majority. When my wife and I went to London in 1990, we returned home with a suitcase full of books. We both have the book habit, badly. We have a Hotel California for books (they can check out, but they never leave.) We get a lot of Amazon boxes. I don't have anything close to an exact count, but I don't think that "several thousand" overstates it.

Most recent purchase(s)

The Runes Of The Earth - I ordered it, it came, my kids gave it to me for Father's Day.
The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen
The Secret Power of Music: The Transformation of Self and Society Through Musical Energy
All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture (Turning Point Christian Worldview)

Currently reading

In preparation for going into The Final Chronicle Of Thomas Covenant, I'm re-reading the first two. This morning, I finished The Power That Preserves and started The Wounded Land. (I've read them 2 or 3 times before, but the last time was several years ago.)

I'm also working my way through The Secret Power of Music, Latourette's A History Of Christianity and Harry Potter et le prisonnier d'Azkaban (to work on my French - it helps enormously to read something that you know as well as I know the Harry Potter books...)

The most recent sports book that I've read is The Numbers Game, an outstanding baseball history that focuses on the statistics of the game and the people that developed them.

Five books that "meant the most"

To start with, I'm going to interpret this as "Five books that meant the most that aren't scripture and I didn't write." So that removes The Bible, and The Red Sox Fan Handbook (Everything you need to be a Red Sox fan … or to marry one) - My Book.

Then I'm going to say that different things have had different meanings at different times. Here are ~5 that have had specific meanings at specific times:
- The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings - When I read these the first time, I was probably 12, and when I finished them I put them down, saying "that was so wonderful that I'm not going to read them again until I forget it all, so I can experience it all again." I re-read the Hobbit several times, but didn't read the Ring trilogy again until 20 years later. No, I didn't forget everything, but it was wonderful again.
- Atlas Shrugged - I bet I'm the first person to mention that, right? Ha, ha. I went through that soft-headed phase that so many do in the late teens, the "we should take care of everyone" phase. I don't agree with her on everything, I recognize that there are flaws in the book (I think I've still never finished Galt's entire speech) but it was a transformative (or restorative) experience.
- While in college, I read Leon Uris' Exodus and Elie Wiesel's Night in close proximity. I then spent several months guilt-wracked for belonging to the same species as the perpetrators of the holocaust.
- Summer Lightning - Someone I was working with handed me a copy of this, and I took it. I had never heard of this Wodehouse fellow before. Well, I loved every word, and have since read everything that I've been able to get my hands on. (The suitcase coming back from London had probably 25-30 Wodehouse books in it, things that were in print in England but not the US.) There have been 3 great masters of the English language - Shakespeare, Dickens and Wodehouse. (Twain was the master of the American language - similar but not the same thing.)
- Witness - Whitaker Chambers wrote the greatest autobiography ever, and one of the definitive works on the political struggle between Communism and the West in the 20th century.
I don't have a nomination for "worst book of all time." What I do have is my "most overrated book of all time." And that easily goes to The Catcher In The Rye. I read it again a couple of years ago, just out of curiousity, to see whether there was something that I'd missed. Nope. There's nothing there. The appeal (other than it's a trivially easy read for a high-school senior) completely escapes me.