(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

I got tagged again for the book meme by ubergreenkat. I did it about three months ago, so here's a quick summary, with a few changes:

1 )Total number of books owned?

About 300, possibly nudged up to 400.

2) The last book I bought?

Would probably be my last remaining textbooks for the coming semester (or what I thought were the last ones, until I saw two books had been added). I got Mordecai Richler's Solomon Gursky Was Here, Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words, Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism, and Graham Allen's Intertextuality. Haven't read any of them yet.

If we're counting graphic novels, I picked up the final Tokyo Babylon today. It's weird reading a tragedy you already know the ending to, although that's always the way it was in ancient theatre. I spoiled it for myself ages ago, while reading the sequel, back in the days when I thought it'd never make it into English.

3) The last book I read?

I am currently reading, concurrently, Tokyo Babylon, C-Level, and Roughing It In the Bush.

Tokyo Babylon is the story of a young, kind-hearted Onmyouji -- a yin-yang wizard -- in modern Tojkyo, who's lured in a twisted game by his evil boyfriend.

C-Level (borrowed from is real YAOI -- Japanese comic gay porn -- which is the choice of reading for Japanese schoolgirls and bored housewives over there. I've never read the real stuff before.

Roughing It In The Bush, of course, is the story of the Samurai Susanna Moodie and her battles against the ninjas of the Canadian wilderness.

Last book I finished was The End of Globalism by John Ralston Saul. And it was the best book on global economics I've read in years

4) Five books that mean a lot to me:

Mostly cut-and-pasted from last time

This is very tough, but I'll give it a go. Just to make it easier on myself in narrowing down the list, I'll assume graphic novels don't count:

• I'm going to cheat and put two Margaret Atwood books on a single entry: Surfacing and The Edible Woman. Both are insightful, and powerful and beautiful. The Edible Woman accomplishes this with tragedy, while Surfacing appeals to my pagan sensibilities. I fell in love with the character of Duncan.
  
  
• I'm going to cheat again and put two John Ralston Saul books on the list: Voltaire's Bastards and Reflections of a Siamese Twin. The first completely altered my understanding of the world, human nature, human potential, history, the arts, etc. Almost every sentence was a revelation that rewrote the way I saw the world, and at 500 pages, that's a lot of sentences. I still use Saul's framework for understanding things. The he brought out Reflections and made me finally understand my country.
  
  
• Plato's Symposium is my favourite classic. Aristophanes' "origin of love" is probably the most beautiful creation myth I know of. There are all sorts of wonderful gleanings from that story.
  
  
• I'm not sure why, but William Gibson's Virtual Light makes this list, narrowly edging out an even better sci-fi writer, Ursula LeGuin, for her Left Hand of Darkness. But since this is a list of books that mean a lot to me, and not a list of good books, Gibson is here because his portrayal of the "the bridge people" has haunted my memory ever since. He captures a new society a moment of its birth, and that subplot is far more interesting than the main plot (although the main plot does have a nice criticism of gentrification).
  
  
• And a guilty pleasure on the list as well -- Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite. Brite manages the same mix of pulpy queer erotica and Gothy beauty that draws me to Descendants of Darkness. Not to everyone's taste, but the romance of Trevor and Zach is probably the best gay romance written in the English language, beating out the pallid and lifeless entries of the great works of modern queer lit.

As for who to tag, I think most of my friends' list has done it, by now, since this is an aging meme. I doubt there are a full five who'd want to do it again.

I'll pass the torch especially to melting_penguin, since she's new enough in LJ space that she hasn't been passed a single meme, much less one on books.

Anyone else who wants to take it up is welcome to :)