Meme continued from chaoticset, from mdxi, from...
1) Total number of books owned?
About 4000 science fiction, about 200 computer, about 1000 other. (Plus about another 2000 in the house belonging to my wife, and another few hundred belonging to my kids...)
2) The last book I bought?
Peter Hamilton - Pandora's Star. (Well, MJD's Higher Order Perl was ordered earlier, shipped about the same time, and received later, so it sort of dependent upon the precise definition of "bought".)
3) The last book I read?
Higher Order Perl.
4) Five books that mean a lot to me (for sufficiently large values of five):
Computer:
The Mythical Man Month - Fred Brooks
Programming Perls - Jon Bently
The Art of Computer Programming - Donald Knuth (lots more)
SF:
Larry Niven
Gordon Dickson
Robert Heinlein
Robert Sawyer
Terry Pratchett
Spider Robinson
(lots more)
mystery:
Leslie Charteris (the Saint)
Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason, Donald Lam, Doug Selby)
Gregory McDonald (Fletch, Flynn)
G. K. Chesterton (Father Brown)
Agatha Christie (many)
other:
Godel, Escher, and Back - Douglas Hofstadter
Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman - Richard Feynman
Patrick O'Brian (Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin stories)
Bridge in the Menagerie - Victor Mollo
(I would probably come up with a totally different list every time I was asked.)
And Freakonomics, which finally taught me that all the interesting things I believed about economics before I read an economics book might have actually been truer than I believed.
I could elaborate, now that I've cast my mind back to find more examples of excellent literature I have read, but instead I am going to gracefully degrade to a previous statement that I've made, and leave the topic at that:
I LOVE BOOKS. Yes, all of them.
Tell me the truth... you live in a library, right?
Re:Tell me the truth...
jmm on 2005-05-20T03:45:00
Well, the computer books are shelved in the computer room which contains most of our computers; the general books are on shelves in the hallway; but the SF and mystery (and some other stuff) are on shelves in my son's room. So, *he* lives in a library. Of course, it does give him something to read...
