Book Meme

Got team-tagged for the infamous Book Meme — both by Patrick Nielsen Hayden of ElectroMakingLite, and by James Martin of the wheatblog.

Total number of books owned:

About 1,500. (The total number of books owned and read would be somewhat smaller.)

Last book bought:

Perfectly Legal: The covert campaign to rig our tax system to benefit the super rich — and cheat everybody else, by David Cay Johnston.

Last book read:

"Neverwhere," by Neil Gaiman. I'd always suspected something like that.

Five books that mean a lot to you:

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. One of the funniest and saddest books I've ever read. It's also probably my favorite book on ecclesiology (the Gately parts). It's 1,400 pages, and when you finish, you flip back to the front and start over again.

Home Economics, by Wendell Berry. And also What Are People For? and Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community and Berry's Collected Poems, especially the Mad Farmer poems. And the novels and short stories. My mom loved those stories and we used to talk about Port William, Ky., as though it was a real place we used to visit.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. It seems at first to be another sprawling, messy, bittersweet John Irving novel, something like Garp or Hotel New Hampshire. But then you realize that it isn't. Bittersweet, yes. Sprawling and messy, no. In his review of Hotel Rwanda, Roger Ebert wrote, "Deep movie emotions for me usually come not when the characters are sad, but when they are good." That, I think, is precisely why I read a new copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany every few years, having given away the old ones.

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. It still astonishes me that the fundamentalists I grew up among actually encouraged me to read these books. Yes, they are full of religious allegory. And yes, Aslan is a Christ figure. But, as Mrs. Beaver and Lewis himself repeatedly remind us, he is not a tame lion. What could have been more subversive, growing up among the Telmarines, than reading Prince Caspian? I still wonder if any of the legalistic fundies who thought they approved of that book had ever actually read it themselves. (If they did, they must have stopped before they got to the Bacchanalia at the end.)

Left Behind, by Timothy LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. This is a book that gets absolutely nothing right. It is bad on every level — instructively bad. In contrast, everything else I read now seems luminous.

Tag five people to continue this meme:

Susie Madrak of Suburban Guerrilla

Bellatrys of Nothing New Under the Sun

Mike Todd of Waving or Drowning?

Carl of FoolBlog, and

Joshua Kaufman Horner of Generosity Without Borders