Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The Last Meme

Actually, I don't know what this meme is supposed to be called. Last place I saw it was at Dorothy's.

How many books do you own? I have more than 2,000 cataloged at Library Thing.

Last book you bought? Ordered on Oct. 10, my last Amazon shipment consisted of The Unbearable Lightness of Being for myself, Bob Anderson's Stretching for S., and and Josip Novakovich's April Fool's Day for R.

Last book someone bought you? Philip Roth's Everyman arrived wrapped in pretty pink paper a few days ago. It's an early birthday present from my friend W.

Last book read? Last book completed was Cai Emmon's The Stylist. Still in progress, D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow. More on these two very soon.

Five books that mean a lot to me: Since my birthday's fast approaching and I'm feeling the decades, I'm going to interpret this to mean books I've held on to since childhood and would grieve over if they were no longer in my possession.

All Horses Go to Heaven by Beth Brown. My sister gave this anthology of horses stories to me for my 10th birthday. It's inscribed in red pen.

Walt Disney's World's of Nature, given to me for Christmas by my brother in '68 or '69. He'd not yet taken to inscribing books he gave me in green pen.

David Grew's The Buckskin Colt. I read this in 4th grade, then proceeded to use its opening pages as a template for my own horse story. In other words, it led me briefly into plagiarism.

My 1972 paperback edition (sans back cover) of Louise Fitzhugh's The Long Secret. I have no recollection of what happened to my copy of Harriet; perhaps my mother gave it away during one of her periodic swoops through my possessions.

Josephine Pullein-Thompson's Plenty of Ponies. I stole this from my cousin T. (one of two I stole from her, I didn't dare take The Godfather since that was one she was sure to miss) when she lived next door. How could I resist? It was about a large family, a large family with horses, and they were all British. I underlined all the words I didn't know in pencil; my vocabulary in those days was pathetic.

2 comments:

  1. I'm kind of curious how many books I own. Perhaps I should join Library Thing just to find out. Or I could simply count them. But it would be nice to have a number.

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  2. You should do it. I thought I had more books than I actually do. I still have boxes of kids books and old Latin texts out in the garage and lit mags that should be cataloged and counted, but I can tell now that they won't add up to the thousands more that I'd at one time assumed I had.

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