Book Lover's Tag

Hedgehog is spending his first birthday playing tag. Congrats on the big day, Lowell.

First he tags Okie Boy. I like Okie Boy and all, he's a genuinely good guy, but his tag response seemed a little highbrow for some car nut from a place where they sing about elephants and corn fields.

So he tagged me; so be it. Tag duties follow.

Total number of books owned, ever:

Probably in the neighborhood of 800. One college summer, I left all my stuff in a house in Bloomington and spent three fabulous months in Maine, living in an old school house, working on a road crew, sailing the Elizabeth Islands (yes, that's Massachusetts not Maine, you geographical smarty pantses!), and when I returned for school in the fall, the house was gone. A parking lot gaped where my books, writings, pictures, keepsakes once were. So those were lost. Some were tossed. But many remain.

Last book I bought:

Two at the same time, actually. Blink: The Power to Think Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, and The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy by Byron York. The first because I thought The Tipping Point was brilliant, the second because I wanted to get more background on what I might expect from the Dems in 2006 and 2008, and because it has perhaps the longest subtitle in the history of publishing.

Last book I read:

Because my lovely wife absconded with Blink, it's The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. And Romans. Amazing book, and it's only 1/66 of The Book.

Five books that mean a lot to me: I have to say Okie Boy's list is remarkably good. Here's mine:

This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. I spent about six years reading nothing but Christian fiction because of this book. Some of the books were amazing, some amazingly bad, and they all were made possible by the bold vision Peretti set down in this book, birthing a genre.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevski. I read it in high school and it taught me I could read serious literature, that there were other countries that were amazing, and that human character is a subject of boundless potential and riveting interest. Also of note: The Brothers K by David James Duncan (Karamazov via baseball), and while we're on the subject, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by W.P. Kinsella, possibly the best baseball book ever. (Okie Boy snuck two into one entry; I bested him with three!)

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. Esquire said that in this book, Vonnegut not only asked the ultimate question of life, but answered it. I don't know about that, but I do know that Winston Niles Rumsford and his dog Kazak being flung between Earth and Titan by the chronosynclastic infidibulum showed me what the fiction of the imagination could be.

My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers. When I became a Christian, my friend Peter, who was a wild child with me in high school but now pastors a church in Israel, suggested I read this book. Besides the Bible, it's the first Christian book I bought, and it is the daily devotional all others aspire to.

The Bible by God. I've been reading it every day for the last nine years and I feel I've just begun. I recently bought The New Inductive Study Bible, and its process of marking nearly every word with a symbol, then studying rigorously, is exciting and enlightening. I think when I'm done that Bible will weigh ten pounds more from all the ink!

I'm passing along the courtesy of the tag to Blogotional, Sue Bob's Diary, and for a twist, to someone who's been posting comments pretty regularly here, Moderate Left.