1) Total number of books owned?
This I am not sure of. I believe a safe rough estimate would be 500. (Currently, anyway. Counting all the books I've ever owned, probably 900. I got rid of a lot of books when I was younger.)
2) The last book I bought?
Linux Unwired.
3) The last book I read?
Cover to cover, Freakonomics. I read 3/4 of Linux Unwired this morning over a biscotti and Earl Grey, and the remaining 1/4 won't mean anything to me until I've got a cell plan or something with IR connections.)
4) Five books that mean a lot to me:
Only five?
- Frogs Into Princes
- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
- Learning Perl, 2nd Ed.
- Shaving The Inside Of Your Skull
- Ringworld
If you know these books, their significance is probably easy to determine. Here's another few for good measure:
- Delivered From Distraction and You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid, or Crazy? for being useful guides to a topic I wasn't familiar with but needed to become familiar with quickly.
- Atlas Shrugged for making me wonder about evaluating people based on merits like integrity and ability.
- Chocolate Heaven for being a cookbook about something I liked enough to try to make recipes from.
- Stranger In A Strange Land, The Martian Chronicles, and Neuromancer, for being simply beautiful pieces of work. Stranger gets another medal, too -- I did not understand why people laugh until I read the reason in Stranger. It's always held true so far.
