Total number of books I've owned: No idea. I sell a lot of them or borrow them from the library, but I can't count how many have passed through my hands. Maybe twice as much as I now have. Right now I have about 3 bookcases' worth.

Last book I bought: A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies, by John Murray. His first book, a collection of short stories. So far (2 1/2 stories in) I really like it.

Last book I read: well, this weekend I re-read most of Wendy Cope's most recent poetry collection (often funny, but not "light," verse, unavailable in this country but worth the trip to Canada), and Spencer Reece's "The Clerk's Tale" (gorgeous lyric poems set in Florida and the Midwest).

Last book I finished: Dana Levin, "Wedding Day." Poems again. She is young, but has a good ear.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

• Borges, "Ficciones." A.'s first present to me.
• Calvino, "Invisible Cities." I read this when I was 13 and waiting in my mom's room in the hospital in Singapore. She did great.
• Jane Kenyon, "Otherwise." My dad gave me this after I got sick once.
• Robert Lowell, selected poems. I called LJC and got her to buy this and bring it to Belmont with, I think, some pizza from Uno's (?). I owe her.
• Stevens, collected poems & prose. I may have mentioned already, my copy of this is inscribed in a shaky cursive from beyond the grave: "Dear Miranda Gaw, Wishing you and yours the very best this Holiday Season 2001, Wally."

Five people I want to see do this: There are definitely more than five people I want to see do this. Snarkout, for example, felt such guilt succumbing to the last meme that it would have been totally hilarious to put him through another one. Also Pica, for essentially the same reasons. But there are rules to be followed, and the last five commenters on this site were

Wag!
Selva!
Jim!
Bhikku!
Paul!

Go to it then, my friends. . .

say

1. By my crude estimate, there are about a thousand books in the house right now – if you add the ones I’ve gotten rid of over the years, maybe 1500.
   
   After last week’s binge of sci-fi books and German books I can’t read, I picked up a twofer: Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” and Gardner’s “On Moral Fiction.” “Beach reading?” asked the woman at the counter.
   
   Yesterday I read “Galaxies Like Grains of Sand” by Brian Aldiss. I quite liked one of his anthologized stories once upon a time, but these turned out to be silly, though the one entirely starring robots was silly in an endearing way.
   
   These were hard to narrow down, actually:
   1) My well-beloved Modern Library hardcover Ulysses, which I bought at age 17 and which forever ruined me for useful work.
   2) The 37-year-old hardcover of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that Pica gave me this fall, obviously battered and beloved by many hands before mine.
   3) Cien Años de Soledad, García Márquez. This was the first foreign-language book I ever bought, thus a monumental act of book-buying hubris. I finished it two or three years later.
   4) The Egyptian Book of the Dead, translated and edited by E.A. Wallis Budge. When I was eleven I pretty much carried this around everywhere I went, including Egypt. Also battered beyond belief.
   5) H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds. I’ve had this one even longer. It lost its spine long ago. Great drawing of tripods on the front.
   — Paul    05.06.06, 2:39pm    #
2. What a fantastic list, Paul… Now I think I understand how you acquired your weirdly comprehensive knowledge of the Egyptian gods.
   — Miranda    05.06.06, 9:57pm    #
3. For my future reference, here are the responses so far…
   
   http://jimfl.tensegrity.net/eb/archives/001466.shtml
   http://www.waggish.org/2005/06/vital_stats.html
   http://www.bhikku.net/2005/06/07.html
   
   Selva gets a pass, having just arrived home from a hellish plane ride…
   — Miranda    05.06.07, 11:42pm    #
4. Here comes Selva!
   http://www.neonepiphany.com/blog/2005/06/08T235959
   — Miranda    05.06.09, 8:37pm    #

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