by popular demand (and a desire to not do work) i will now do the book survey.
1. Total number of books owned?
based on a count of the books on the shelf directly next to me, a knowledge that there are at least twice as many in the garage and a few more in the basement, probably ~200.
2. The last book I bought?
"Electric Sound" by joel chadabe (text for class). the last book i bought for pleasure... i don't remember, i've been using the library a lot recently.
3. The last book I read?
Currently reading "Tales of Pirx the Pilot" by Stanislaw Lem. Picked this up off the shelf in the library because i had never read any Lem, despite having never heard of this book. It's taking me a long time because i've been leaving it home to force myself to read the aforementioned "Electric Sound" on the train. Before that, I read "The Final Solution" by Michael Chabon. The last really good book I read was probably "Satan in Goray" by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
4. 5 books that mean a lot to me?
- Everyone seems to be starting with their favorite book, and mine is "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams
- "Childhood's End" by Arthur C. Clarke, besides being all around wonderful, has the most brilliant plot twist of all time. and you will never, ever even see it coming, even though I told you it was there.
- The words "mean a lot to me" simply beg for the inclusion of a childhood book, and I would like to put "A Carp in the Bathtub" which amazon helpfully tells me is by Barbara Cohen. This book is really about Jewish life in lower class brooklyn in the early part of the 20th century, but the plot centers around a young brother and sister trying to save the carp living in their bathtub for a week before their mother makes gefilte fish for passover.
- "Civilization and Its Discontents" by Sigmund Freud is great because it's the book where Freud basically goes "listen, i know i wrote all sorts of stuff about sex and id and ego and consciousness and dreams, but that's all just ephemera in the grand scheme of things. in the end you can either create or destroy: time to choose sides."
- When "The Complete Calvin & Hobbes" comes out and i can count it as one book, it will be the fifth. in the meantime, a completely random handful of others that i've liked but wouldn't necessarily say "mean a lot to me" (the first few that come to mind): "pattern recognition" by william gibson; "ender's game" by orson scott card (fun new game! is this book an apologist parable for hitler?); "american psycho" by bret easton ellis; "a tale of two cities," which i think i like mostly because i read it with my dad and was the first book i ever read where i knew that there was more than was showing on the surface; doh i can't believe i didn't put 1984 here.
- also not really a book: many, many short stories by ray bradbury are superlatively wonderful but my absolute favorite is "The Toynbee Convector," which can be found in a collection by the same name. also really good overall is the first bradbury short story collection, the october country.
5. Tag 5 people and have them fill this out on their ljs:
my friends are either cooler than i am and did this first, or are cooler than i am and would never do this.
movie survey to come later after i get some work done.
>some theories maybe have merit, like the whole id/ego/superego thing, i can buy that, but a lot of the rest of it? crap. and it's mostly pompous and boring crap.
ReplyDeletebut that's exactly the point. civilization and its discontents is about how all of that stuff is unimportant compared to the really big questions. it makes clear that all of the stuff that came before was not so much an attempt to understand the workings of the brain as it was to understand the universe.
someone once said that einstein was not really interested in relativity per se; he was trying to answer the question "if i was god, how would i make the universe?" i think "civilization and..." puts the rest of freud into a similar perspective.