Unqualified Offerings

Eve hands me one of the book memes.

1. Total Number of Books I’ve Owned. The mind boggles. I used to work in the book business. I got free books of all kinds and a discount on almost everything I couldn’t get free. I’m married to a bookworm and the community property laws incline me to think I own her books too. Speaking of which, the coolest item in my wife’s dowry was an original-spelling anthology of Sixteenth Century English verse from one of her college courses. With it you could trace the de-Frenchifying of the language over the course of a hundred years. Fascinating stuff.

But where was I? I’ve owned thousands of books in my life. I’m sure we have more than a thousand books in the house now.

2. Last Book I Bought. The Twelve-Week Triathlete, by Tom Holland. A special virtue of this book is that it covers the transition stages of the race in more detail than other triathlon books I’ve read.

3. Last Book I Read. Refusing Heaven, by Jack Gilbert.

4. Five Books That Mean A Lot to Me

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle. Just thought I’d mention, the people who say that Dick’s great theme is that reality is entirely subjective are plain wrong. Hawthorne Abendsen gets so angry because there is a “real world,” and he’s not living in it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. This book, about a man named Nick Carraway, is the secret progenitor of the American hard-boiled novel. Granted, Hammett was already on the job . . .

Alan Furst, Night Soldiers. I love spy novels, but none more than this one. The epic sweep of the secret history of totalitarian Europe from 1933-45.

Kirkpatrick and Goodfellow, eds. Poetry with Pleasure. This was just a high-school textbook my youngest brother had lying around the house when I was in my early twenties. Thing is, I picked it up one night from nothing better to do and finally got poetry. It lived for me, for the first time, and became the consuming passion of a decade of my life. I never reread that book any more – I’ve got plenty better sources of poems to read – but I owe it.

Jack Kirby, The Hunger Dogs. Why, out of all possible comic books and graphic novels I’ve read, this late and problematic work by a creator I was slow to appreciate? A couple of reasons: 1. The meme isn’t “your five favorite books” or “the best books ever (in your opinion),” it’s “five books that mean a lot to you.” And something about the ferocity of the Armagetto rioters, Darkseid’s disgust with the increasing mechanization of destruction, and the late splash page of Apokalips’ destruction, sticks with me.

5. Tag 5 people and have them do this on their blog. Holbo, Waring, Collins, Oberwetter, Vincent.