You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Books, Internets, School

I've been tempted to take part in a meme that appeared in Jenni's blog - unsurprisingly, it's book related. Don't worry, I doubt it's the start of a trend. ;) I think my main reason for filling out the answers was that I knew the answers to some of them, and knew that I didn't know the answers to others. Anyhoo, on the questions!

How many books do you own?
According to my records, I have 1124 fiction books, 406 non-fiction books, and 96 Graphic novels, for a grand total of 1626 books. I suspect that a few books have slipped in "under the radar", as it were, but this is a reasonably complete survey of the books I own.

There are two large bookshelves and one half-size bookshelf in the hall, which is where most of my non-fiction and detective fiction lives; there are a similar number of bookshelves in my room, though I really need another big shelf or two so I can stop double-stacking. There are also about four or five A4 boxes of unread books under my window, and two large plastic trundle-boxes and three or four A4 boxes of unread books under my bed. I have no idea where these will go once I read them, but at my current rate of consumption, I suspect that it's not a problem I'll need to worry about for a little while.

What is the last book you bought?
Well, I bought SK a book of urban myths that looked pretty interesting for his birthday last week... but I suspect that you're meant to talk about books you've bought for yourself. Hmm.

It's actually been quite a while since I've bought any books - the weight of the Unread sits on my conscience. I think the last one was a book of folk stories told by people who'd moved to Australia from different parts of Indo-China, which was written in both English and the person's native language (Thai, Korean, etc.) - it had some details about the narrator's life in the old country, and how it was they had come to know the story. It was pretty nifty. Ah, here are the details - Stories and Storytellers From Indo-China, edited by Morag Loh.

What is the last book you read?
I've just finished reading What If? The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley & Stephen E. Ambrose. Interesting, but in many cases I felt like the historians simply pointed at the turning point, rather than exploring the consequences; on the other hand, even my limited knowledge of history let me recognise that some of the consequences suggested had more to do with the historian's personal biases than a sober assessment of the situation. I suspect that this is why I like the whole newsgroup set-up - it lets me get a feel for alternate viewpoints and the kind of debate reasonable people might have. (Okay, maybe that's not true for all newsgroups, or even all members of good newsgroups. But you can't have everything. ;)

Name five books that mean a lot to you.
Blood and Honour, by Simon Green. I read it before Blue Moon Rising, so while I like that book, it's this one that's stayed with me. There's a interaction in the second or third season of The West Wing, where the protagonists are arguing about which Gilbert & Sullivan opera a particular song comes from - one says, "It's the one about duty!" and the other replies, "They're all about duty!" I think that's why I like the G&S operettas, and why I like this book.

Guns, Germs & Steel, by Jared Diamond. It's not necessarily the easiest read, but it gave me a lot to think about, and the basic conceit (that geography plays a vital role in the large scale of history) is convincingly argued. It's one of those books that is just begs to be mentioned to friends or brought up when you want a meaty discussion; however, unlike Blood & Honour, it's not a book that I've reread a bunch of times. Still, it's one of those cannonical books that you hear about a lot if you read in certain subjects, and then you read it yourself, and then it's, "Yeah, I see why people point at it as one of the Books You Should Read."

Three others... hmm. I think the Solar Queen series merits a mention, possibly because these are the first books that I remember thinking, "Wait a mintute, that doesn't make any sense" - and then decided to go on and enjoy the book regardless. (There was some plot point where they hid from the authorities of Earth by landing in the middle of a radioactive wasteland, which happened to have recovered. But if the Earth authorities had spaceships, wouldn't they be able to overfly the area, and even if they didn't apot our heroes, wouldn't they have noticed the weird alien life in the middle of this supposed dead spot, and have investigated?) It was also around the time when I filled out piles and piles of interloan request forms - I remember I was 11, because you had to fill out your age, and for a while after then, I'd write "11" in that space on those pink cards by default, because I'd filled out so many of them in one almighty go. :)

Two more. I remember a sf collection that my parents had which contained two of the most terrifying stories I'd ever read - "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell and Tom Godwin's 1954 classic "The Cold Equations". "Who Goes There?" became the movie, The Thing, and essentially asked - if a creature could absorb and steal the shape of any living thing, how would you detect it? How would you stop it? It's a tense action story, with heroes and monsters - I've seen it compared to Beowulf in theme. "The Cold Equations", on the other hand, is all about the fact that sometimes the universe doesn't care what kind of person you are. A girl stows away in a spaceship, and the pilot must eject her into space, because he doesn't have enough fuel to take her with him, and she can't pilot the ship alone. I couldn't sleep for hours after reading this story - the image of the compasionate pilot having to kill the essentially innocent stowaway was something that I found quite freaky.

Last one... The Double Helix, by James Watson. I appreciate that it may be a biased account of the discovery of DNA, and may paint an unfair picture of Rosalind Franklin - but it's a compelling account, and probably one of the reasons that I became interested in biology in the first place.

Huh. That was harder than I thought it would be. :)

***

In my office, we were discussing what a bad idea a cross between Snoop Dog-style slang and Leet would be. "D15 be teh sh1zzlexor!!1one!1!" "W00t1zzl3!!"

This conversation sprang out of an anecdote about someone calling something "teh suxxor", and having the people around him going, "huh?" He said it wasn't so much that he was surprised that they hadn't heard it before, but that they weren't able to work out what he meant by context - though to be fair, they might have thought that he had simply used a foreign phrase that they were unfamiliar with. But I've had the same experience - I would have thought that calling someone "teh awesome" would be pretty clear, but apparently not. Maybe they were simply weirded out that I was using slang. Wait a sec - "weirded out"? Would I have used that phrase if it weren't for Strongbad? Damn you, internets!

On a related note, I know I'm not on the cutting edge of internet humour and craziness - it was several months after the fact (after the fad?) that I saw the llama song, for instance, and the same with the whole "All Your Base" thing or even Bananaphone. But there are things that I think of as being around forever, like the whole Mahir/"I Kiss You!!!!" craze, or even The Big Red Button That Doesn't Do Anything, which I just kinda assume are part of the whole "using the net" experience - and maybe it is, if you've been using it since early enough. Maybe the web's too big now for the hamsterdance... which might not be a bad thing. :) However, I do remember sending my mother the original hamsterdance, and hearing that my youngest sister had been reduced to tears of laughter.

It feels like I should have a summary point that I've been working toward; unfortunately, I don't know that I do, other than, "Sometimes I fail the Smarties test." (For those who aren't interested in developmental psychology, you show the child a packet of Smarties, and ask them what they think is in the box. You then show them that it's full of pencils (or whatever). You then tell them that you're going to ask their mum, who is out of the room, what is in the box - and what do they think their mum will say? It's a test about when you get an internal model of other people's mental states.)

***

I thought Jenni might be interested in Barbies customized to look like the members of Kiss, amoung other things.

***

Meant to mention my primary school's 150th year reunion. Unsurprisingly, very few people from my cohort turned up - I mean, I was really only there because I was the only child from my family in the city apart from my youngest sister, so I had to go to support my father (who in turn had to go, because he had been on the Board of Trustees for so long). In fact, I was the only one from my year - there were a handful of girls from the year ahead of me, and a few people from the year behind me. But all in all, it wasn't too bad - I chatted to some former teachers, some of whom appeared to have been unchanged by the passage of years (and one or two who were fairly shockingly different). I can certainly see why the "school reunion" is such a big thing in the States, and is such a useful setting for fiction; but I'm not really surprised that there were so few people in the post-1970 group photo.

Incidentally, my old school was St Francis de Sales, formerly St Madeline Sophies, and the motto of the school is, "The Measure of Love is Love Without Measure". Not a slogan to push you to academic heights, true, but not a bad thing to strive for, really.

Posted by svend at June 11, 2005 11:34 AM