First, apologies to all the people who posted comments and who then wondered why their comments never appeared. Akismet ate them. I have beaten Akismet with a stick and it has regurgitated at least one. Sorry, Ed.
Second, apologies to anyone who was wondering where I’d got to. I was off being educated, of course. And not only in The Ways of The Keepers of The Wisdom of Mankind, but also in the new, post-surgical state of my innards. This last a bizarre mixture of the fascinating, the relieving, and the depressing, complete with photographic tour of the high-lights (eh heh heh heh) (gosh, but my liver is cute). And so, surgery has done what it can to restore a certain normality to my inner configurations (complete normality apparantly being beyond me), and anything I still can’t cope with is my own problem.
Bah.
Third, apologies for doing a meme instead of posting something long and/or insightful about University life/ a good book I might have read/ politics/ humour. I have been fly-papered with hand-outs and reading-lists, and it seems to be taking longer than necessary to un-stick the writery bit. S found this meme at The Pickards and showed it to me, and I thought, oh, whyever the hell not. And then I got S to count the books.
The Booky Meme
Total Number of Books Owned - S gave up when it came to the large card-board boxes of doom holding up the plaster-work in the study, and estimated somewhere a little over 700. Not counting Library books, the management of which, now that I belong to four libraries, is the main calibrator of the net worth of my bank account.
Last Book Bought – Actually three books, as they were really rather cheap, only £3 each. Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair, The Power of Darkness – Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit (somewhat unexpected of her, isn’t it?), and Children of the Night – Classic Vampire Stories which includes Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ and ‘Varney the Vampire’, and so is an Essential Item. I have started reading the Nesbit book, and juxtaposing ‘Man-Size in Marble’ with The Railway Children gives one a queer and sinking sensation of the stomach, and also increased respect for the author, who rocks just a little bit.
Last Book Read – This is clearly a question formulated by the not-hysterically-bookish, isn’t it? Are they seriously expecting a one-book answer? I couldn’t read one book at a time, and finish book A before I started B, unless I was locked in a cell. The last book I finished reading was Science of the Discworld II: The Globe [For the third time, I might add - Ed]. The last book I did some reading in was The Jewel of the Seven Stars, by Bram Stoker, which, by the way, is painfully tiresome after Dracula, and, despite a good gory start, about as heart-chilling as The Archers. [Notice a common thread yet? She tends to find her Inner Goth in Autumn. Who is rotten company, by the way]. I am also reading the E. Nesbit stories mentioned above, a rather good little book on knitting written before I was born, and Essential Cataloguing. Oh, and Stardust by Neil Gaiman. And Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett. And Does Anything Eat Wasps (actually, S is reading that to me. Still. He reads out a question, I pontificate at length on the answer, S kindly does not laugh at me). Oh, and The Dyer’s Hand, and a book of C.S. Lewis essays, and [Stop this madness right now].
Five books that mean a lot to me - This one is almost impossible. There are at least a hundred books that mean a lot to me, and which book means most depends on time of year, mood, state of health, and which other books I have read recently. Oh, dammit, it’ll have to be the first five meaningful books that pop into my head. The which selection may well make me look like a fruit-loop.
- The Lord of the Rings. I read this at exactly the right [or, possibly, wrong] age. I was a solitary, highly imaginative child, I tended not so much to read books as to fall into them, and tales of lonely desperate bravery by small frail creatures adrift in a huge and ancient world they barely understood? Hook line and sinker. I have never recovered. In a Silmarillion memorising, can write in Dwarvish Runes kind of way. Sad, isn’t it?
- The Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology. A huge, beautifully illustrated object, this, now very sadly utterly out of print. I loved it with a passion, especially the Robert Graves-authored section on Greek Myth. My mother has a distinct memory of me getting it off the shelf and poring through it at the age of six, though I daresay I was admiring the pictures of Hera bathing naked rather than actually reading it.
- A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Again, given to me at just the time when I was most liable to be blown away by it. Like Tolkien, she has a gift for making an entire world spread infinitely away all around the story. Also, the bit with the gebbeth and the Terrenon in Osskil scared the bejayzus out of me. It was the first book for children I had read in which the stakes were that high. Technically, one ought to have felt it in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Aslan dies, which I read at about the same time, but despite the pity I felt for Lucy and Susan’s grief, I never really believed that something permanently dreadful had happened. Le Guin made me feel like the floor was sliding out from under me.
- Othello, by Shakespeare and Oscar Zarate. Now this was a graphic novel version that someone saw fit to give a child as it was clearly only a comic book. And Shakespeare! So educational. It was full-text, which meant a lot of the speech bubbles were very large and filled with teeny-tiny writing, and took quite some reading. The pictures were very sombre, angular, and of course everything went terribly wrong and it was so gut-wrenchingly unfair and I have been a Shakespeare addict ever since.
- Book five is rather an amalgam of the complete works of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, both of which I discovered in my teens. I was at the time completely surrounded by people who thought SF&F was a genre for very sad men with no girl-friends, and certainly no concept they could be satirical and funny [The sad men or the SF&F?And yes, you too can live in a Pratchett-Adams-free universe. Spend your life either up an Italian mountain in the bosom of your insane family, or at a boarding school populated by boy-mad sexually repressed daughters of the Army]. These were by necessity very private, deeply personal discoveries. And oh, crikey, how I laughed. Mine! All mine! Bwahahahahah.
(I am rather concerned that I don’t seem to have read any meaningful books since the age of fifteen).
Four People You’re Tagging With This Meme
Aphra, Sol, Ærchie, Lilian, you’re it!
(I am very very ashamed to note that this simple little memery post took two days to write. Dear God, what is happening to me?)
