ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

I thought it was about time for another meme, and although I wasn’t directly tagged, as the Goldfish did reference me in her meme, I thought it would be churlish not to take part.

I must also add it’s unusual to be taking part in a book-related meme I’ve not picked up from Stephen Lang, as he’s quite book-orientated, but what the heck. I’ll just have to tag him with it at the end.

Anyway, here goes:

Total Number of Books Owned

Let me see: I have thirty-seven book shelves in my study, all approximately the same length. A random sampling of one shelf reveals thirty-four books per shelf, so I make that approximately 1,250. But that doesn’t count the eighty or so books I have scattered around in various locations that aren’t actually on a shelf at the moment, or the books packed away in boxes, so I’d guess it’s likely to be at least 1,500.

Does that count as “a lot”?

Last Book Bought

That would be “The Mephisto Club”, by Tess Gerritsen. I’ve not read it yet, but I’d read her book ‘Vanish’ before and had enjoyed that, so when I saw this one in paperback I picked it up. I’m planning to take it away on holiday with me shortly.

Last Book Read

You wouldn’t think this one would be difficult, would you? For someone who reads on average four to five books a week, it’s an incredibly unusual situation, but I think it’s at least a week since I’ve read a book. The last one I completed would have been Christopher Brookmyre’s “Be My Enemy” (a re-read); but I’m currently re-reading Terry Pratchett’s “Witches Abroad”.

Five books that mean a lot to me

Lord Of The Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien): I read it as a child, having borrowed it from the library. I then borrowed it, and re-borrowed it, not because I wanted to finish reading it, but because I wanted to read it again and again. And now Peter Jackson’s made a cracking film of it.

Fire And Hemlock (Diana Wynne Jones). It only ever hit me one summer, but it was one lazy summer after my parents were divorced, and I’d gone to stay with my Dad, and it was something I seemed to keep coming back to when he was at work; the sense of otherness resonated with me. It was just that summer, and I don’t think I’ve read it since, but when you associate a book that strongly with a summer holiday that you can not only remember reading it, you can remember where you read it, what the carpet you were sitting on was like, and so on, I think it deserves a place.

The Mismeasure of Man (Stephen Jay Gould). It’s not a work of fiction, it’s an intelligent and damning scientific critique into some of the measures that were used to “test intelligence” from the blatant racism of associated with craniometry (which states largest brain = cleverest), where large skulls were obviously white European because they were larger. It also looks at slightly more sophisticated IQ testing (and continues to uncover problems) and also covers subjects like eugenics.

I’d say this book was very influential because it shows that when something is enshrined as a paradigm — “white Europeans are the smartest” — it’s easy for scientists not to even realise that their testing is fundamentally flawed because it has been set up with a priori assumptions. Challenge everything: assume nothing.

Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner): or why everything you know is wrong. An economist and a journalist get together to discover that the biggest factor in falling crime in the US was the legalisation of abortion twenty years earlier; why your swimming pool is more likely to kill your child than a gun; why drug dealers tend to live with their mothers, why what you do as a parent is much less important than who you are, and much, much more.

Of the five, this is the book I’d tell everyone to go out and buy. It’s informative and fun. Just remember to challenge those assumptions…

The Belgariad and The Malloreon (David Eddings). This is a ten-book fantasy epic (or really, two five-book epics that follow on from each other) that I started getting at about the same time as I read Fire and Hemlock.

This stands out in my mind for three reasons: firstly because it was the first time I remember having to wait to read the end, as only the first two books in the second series had been published by the time I’d got to that point, so chronologically it probably took me about three years to read the series.

Secondly because when I started reading them, I was about twelve or thirteen and so I closely identified with the main character of the Belgariad, a fourteen year old farm-hand called Garion, who grows up to be… well, you’d find that out if you read the books.

Finally, because when my wife was pregnant with our first child, she liked me to read to her in bed, and I read the Belgariad out loud to her, which is really quite a personal thing.

Four People You’re Tagging With This Meme

Well, as Diddums tagged four people and so did The Goldfish, I’m going to assume that I’m supposed to tag four people. So here goes:

1. Stephen Lang. Although as it’s a book meme, he’s probably already done it.
2. The Very True Steve Pugh, as it appears he’s not done a meme for a while
3. Tess Gerritsen herself, as I’ve just discovered she’s got a blog, and she seems to post regularly on it. Well look, there’s no harm in asking, is there?
4. …and Rich Pedley, just to hopefully give him the opportunity to demonstrate that some of his hobbies/interests are different to mine. The pressure’s on…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 12:37 am and is filed under Books, Memes, The Pickards. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.