Book Tag

Finally. GI Korea tagged me to join in a bloggers game to describe my interests in books. I watched sadly as the A-list Korean bloggers choose each other and I truly learned my place in the blogosphere. That's not to say anything bad about the GI whose blog has the most indepth commentary I've seen.

Coincidentally, I was reading up on tag so as to teach it to an ESL class. Sure, any individual game of tag is easy to teach, but try the terminology. In Canada, the person doing the chasing is called "it". Explain "it" - and not the "They're doing it!" idiom.

Anyway, now I'm 'it'.

How many books have I read?
As with everyone else in this game of tag, thousands. As with the other bloggers I read, I am old enough to have grown up with books rather than the computer to entertain me. I bought my first computer in '81, so I wonder how people born after that would respond.

Everytime I visit my mother's house in Canada, I both choose a half dozen books to bring to Korea and take another dozen (or two or three) books to the local used book store. I am probably down to a hundred books at my mother's house. In Korea, I have a large bookshelf full but also leave books at a coworkers office that serves as a current English language book for coworkers.

The last book I bought and read.
I have a four pack coming from Amazon right now. I recently reread the two Shaara's accounts of the American civil war but the last book I read for the first time is 'Guns, Germs and Steel' which I reviewed here.

The last book I read but didn't buy.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place. A gift from my sister, it tells the true story of a man who was exploring a crevice and had a rock fall on his hand, trapping him in place.

five books that meant a lot to me
In no particular order:

1) Ringworld - or the Ringworld series. Larry Niven is a great SF author who puts the emphasis on the Science part of science fiction. Each book is great but the first was strikingly original. Since then, each new book (there are three and the gap betwen first and last is 30 years) has had new technology that was missing in the earlier books which is as jarring as it was in the Star Wars movies.


2) Our Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. Sagan was a wonderfully articulate astronomy and science populizer. In this book, he compares ancient accounts of demonic and angelic sightings with modern accounts of UFOs and finds the stories are the same with new covers.


3) Any of Tim Powers' books. My favorite is 'Anubis Gates'. He is known as the author who must hate his heroes- most of them finish the story missing fingers or more. He studies historical documents and keep the known timeline. Then he fills in the blanks with magic and secret conspiracies.


4) Where Rivers Run, by the Macguffins. Gary and Joan were neighbors of mine in Bracebridge and have written books on exploring Canada by canoe. Reading their exploits, you see a mater-of fact, "we went from A to B on the twentieth" then you look at a map and see they travelled fifty or seventy km in a day.

5) Thor Heyerdahl's adventures, especially Kon-tiki: Across the Pacific by raft. His work, particularly on Easter Island, has not been well recieved by professional historians and I don't know why... But I don't care. The stories are very exciting on their own. Simply thinking about his books makes me want to find a way to sail home when we leave Korea for Canada.


Who's next
After badmouthing myself as a C-list blogger, tagging someone else might be considered rude. Still, I would like to hear from Lao-ocean girl, James and Rory . I hope they do see it as a compliment, as I intend it to be.