Every Day an Adventure

ciole tagged me for the book meme, and oddly enough last night I actually started an effort to catalog my baseball books. I have a ton more than I thought. Heh.

1) Total number of books owned?

I am guessing about 700-800.

2) The last books I bought?

Oddly I just answered this in an entry a few days ago! :) On my Powell's run, I got the following:
The Curious Case of Sidd Finch by George Plimpton
Babe: The Legend Comes to Life by Robert Creamer
Perfect by James Buckley
Maybe I'll Pitch Forever by Satchel Paige
I Ain't No Athlete, Lady by John Kruk
Sweet Seasons: Recollections of the 1955-64 New York Yankees by Dom Forker
Slick: My Life In And Around Baseball by Whitey Ford
Now Pitching: Bob Feller, by Bob Feller
You've Got to Have Balls to Make It in This League: My Life as an Umpire by Pam Postema

3) The last book I read?

I'm trying to remember what I finished before embarking upon The Donald Honig Reader, which is what I'm in the middle of now. I think it was "Remembering Japanese Baseball" by Rob Fitts; these are both baseball oral history books and absolutely fabulous. I'm not counting books I "read through" at Powell's, nor Moneyball which I re-read 75% of on a whim the other day.

The last non-baseball books I read? Well, I read Dork Tower volumes 6 and 7 recently, but those are comic book compendiums, so I dunno if they count. I read through big sections of several technical books in the last few months, but I don't think they count either, nor D&D handbooks. So the last non-baseball novel I read through was probably The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas.

4) 5 books that mean a lot to me?

The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende. I read this when I was 7 or 8 years old, and I was so proud of myself for reading a 400-page book back then. I still have large parts of the book memorized.

Dragonlance, Legends 1-3, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. When I was 14 years old, Raistlin was the coolest character ever invented. Note I say Legends and not Chronicles. Chronicles 3 was the first book I ever stayed up until 8-9am reading through the entire night, but Legends meant a lot more to me.

The C Programming Language, first edition, by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. It's not that the book's contents are so wonderful, but the copy I have was given to me as a present by Kirk Yenerall at the end of the computer science lab course at PGSS 1993. A year later I got it signed by Kernighan when he showed up at CMU. Huge sentimental value. It's the first real programming book I owned.

Bridge in the Menagerie, by Victor Mollo. Matt or Erich gave me this book back when we all used to play bridge 200 hours a week in Donner Hall. We named Matt's stuffed bunny rabbit Rueful, even, after one of the characters in it. I just loved all of Victor Mollo's books, and this is the best one.

The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter. This is the book that got me to stop reading everything but baseball books a few years back. It's not only an amazing baseball book, but it's also just an amazing oral history book, period. I remember when I read it, I got about 30-40 pages in and realized, "Oh crap, this book is so good I can't put it down... but worse, it's going to end sometime and I'm going to be so sad when it does!"

5) Tag 5 people and have them fill this out on their ljs:

damienroc because I keep lending him books.
wooko because he reads as much as I do and never writes in his LJ.
bhudson because it occurs to me I don't know what he likes reading.
nickjong because we used to talk about books but it's been a while.
samildanach because the original reason I talked to him at drum corps was because of a book he was reading.