Book-Tagged!
The Eclectic Econoclast has book-tagged me!1. Total number of books I have owned.
This calls for a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Let's say I read 2 books a week (probably a slight overestimate) and have been doing so for 40 years (a slight underestimate). I do not use libraries much so we'll assume I owned all the books I read; I probably also own a few hundred books I have not yet read, so we're probably in the ballpark of 4000-4500.
2. Last book I bought
The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley. I have not yet read more than the introduction. I have long been fascinated by attempts to explain our mysterious if imperfect ability to work together on a grand scale.
3. Last book I read
Well, I just finished Ian McEwan's Saturday. I have already said a little bit about it here. And I have two books currently on the go. One is Irshad Manji's The Trouble with Islam. She hosts my favourite television show (Big Ideas on TV Ontario), used to annoy me completely when she was on City-TV, but what annoyed me was partly her relentless curiosity and openness and it shows through wonderfully in her timely book. The other is Paul Seabright's The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life. It is addressing the same question as Ridley's book above, but with more of a focus, I would guess from the titles, on the co-operation and willingness to trade that is key to economic progress.
4. Five books that mean a lot to me
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. I am not sure which of this very long and relentless book and the short and elegant The Blind Watchmaker is the most compelling pressentation of the subject, but I read Dennett's first.
- Flashman by George McDonald Fraser. The whole series is what I really mean. The humour drags you in, the cynicism of the narrator lets you relax, but along the way he teaches you an enormous amount of nineteenth-century history. The portrayal of Geronimo in 'Flashman and the Redskins' is utterly compelling. With these novels Fraser most subtly took apart my puerile anti-militarism and superficial pacifism.
- Ulysses yes, the one by James Joyce. In some ways despite the technical derring-do, the human story of the wonderful Leopold Bloom, his somewhat odd relationship with is wife, and the rather less pleasant Stephen Daedalus has a core of feeling that matters. And in the end the technical derring-do actually does help make this everyday story a little more universal.
- Poetry of W. B. Yeats The link is to one collection of his works. But it is his poetry that finally made me attentive to the charms of poetry.
- Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell. I don't think anything would have changed my early commitment to mathematics, but this book was an early one in letting me know the history of the field.
5. Tag Five People and have them do this on their blogs.
Hmmm - still a neophyte so don't have quite the network of some others. I'll pick people I have communicated with so they won't view my mail immediately as spam.
So I shall shortly inflict this task on:
- Bill Dawson of Dawson's Danube. We have yet to meet but I hope it will happen this year. We share an enthusiasm for specific coffee shops in Berkeley, and for Austria.
- David Kaspar of David's Medienkritik. Entertaining coverage of the German media.
- Scott Burgess of The Daily Ablution. This is a must for me every day and usually has me laughing (though if I lived in the UK my reactions might be different).
- Michael Stastny, Mahalanobis, of the alpha and the omega. More Austrian connections.
- The Amateur of That's Amateur. Eclectic and I have been pleased at his interest in the curling blog.
posted by Alan Adamson @ 3:13 PM
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