total number of books i’ve owned: good god. a thousand? two thousand? while the installation of new bookshelves last week did require that we reorganize all of the books currently residing in the apartment, (alphabetize the fiction by author, and develop the jen-and-andy-decimal system for non-fiction and theatre) i don’t have the heart to try and count them now. but baby, i ripped through those babysitters’ club series when i was a kid. i kept a regular pace of 2-3 books a week for all of my grade school and junior high school years, so those must have added up pretty fast.
last book I bought: used copy of reading lolita in tehran. the “i’m a memoir so coherent through-lines don’t’ apply to me” approach is more than a little annoying, but i can’t get over how fascinating the subject matter is.
last book i read: still half-heartedly working through will of the world, a shakespeare biography andy’s dad gave us, and ouch. i didn’t think it possible to write such a boring book about such an interesting person. guess i’ll stick to my glossy full-color shakespeare in love misconceptions instead.
last book i finished: the time traveler’s wife see below.
5 books that mean a lot to me:
zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance i’m especially attached to the particular edition i have, which i inherited from my father and have since loaned out to many friends. there’s something about the physical presence of a book that has been read so many times the cover is falling off that pleases me.
alice in wonderland the alice in wonderland tale is one that is ripe for telling and re-telling, and i’ve loved nearly every version of it i’ve encountered, from jeff noon’s hipster remix alice to the excellently acrobatic lookingglass alice production mounted recently by lookingglass theatre in chicago.
the time traveler’s wife so, so beautiful, in brutal, gritty sort of way.
the hobbit i didn’t grow up with the hobbit and lord of the rings like most kids; but about five years ago (long before the movies) my friend nick discovered that i hadn’t read them and arrived the next day on my doorstep with four much-loved paperback editions and said, “don’t give them back till you’ve read them.” i read them all that summer after college, living on my own up in san francisco, and they were such a treat, i couldn’t believe they’d been waiting for me all these years and i had just finally discovered them. andy and i have since read all of them aloud to one another, and i have pleasant memories of long summer afternoons spent in the park with andy (who does all the voices better than i ever could hear them in my head), but more than anything they recapture for me cool, foggy san francisco days, sitting on the beach at the end of golden gate park, digging my feet into cold sand and sitting on driftwood while strands of summer fog drifted by.
east of the moon and west of the sun specifically, the edition with the kay nielson illustrations (out of print but available from rare-book collectors). it’s this amazing collection of norwegian mythology that we used to read when i was a kid, and the stories and illustrations, although i haven’t read them in years, still haunt me. need an escapist afternoon? look this one up at the public library and find a big, comfy chair in a corner somewhere.