MCF invited me to participate in this MEME topic, and I thought it looked pretty good, so here goes:

Total Books Owned, Ever:

No clue. Not the first clue. Bunches and bunches and piles and gobs o’ books.


Last Book I Bought:

Selected Writings by Thomas Aquinas (compiled by Ralph McInerny)

Last Book I Read:

I am usually simultaneously reading one to three books at any given time. Right now I’m reading a text on Plato, the Aquinas book mentioned above, and I’ve been reading a little of the first chapter of Wendy’s copy of Master of Space and Time by Rudy Rucker. I think it will be the next book I read, just to take a break with something light.

However, I suppose that the last book I actually completed was The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Five Books that Mean A Lot To Me:

There’s no way I can limit myself to five. I can do ten, though… and in no particular order, they are:

The Bible

‘Nuff said.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

My textbook for life.

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

This lends so much balance to the confidence and surety that C.S. Lewis wrote his early theology with. Lewis could expound on pain, loss, grief, and fear, but he’d not dealt much with those things personally. When his wife died painfully of cancer after only a few brief years of marriage, Lewis suddenly found himself living a life that had only been a theoretical, academic idea to him before. This diary (which he wrote without ever intending to publish) is the most compelling, personal glimpse of a man I’ve ever read. It brings tears to my eyes, and restores my hope in the face of any darkness.

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

The masterpiece of Jack’s fiction. It’s beautiful, startling, breath-taking. I can’t recommend it enough.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (if I had to pick one of the seven chronicles, it would be The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.)

It’s hard to pick one. The first one, LWW, does stand out, though. If I had to take only one volume from the series to read again, that would be it.

A note to parents or anyone who hasn't read the Chronicles... the reason I didn't include a link to any of the bound volumes of all seven books, or any of the boxed sets, is because the Harper Collins editions have the books IN THE WRONG ORDER. They begin with The Magician's Nephew because it is the origins story. However, The Magicians Nephew is the SIXTH of the SEVEN BOOKS and must be read sixth in the series! Harper Collins is messing with the sequence of the books in a criminal, unexcusable way. Buy Paul Ford's wonderful, brilliant Companion to Narnia, which details the proper order to read the books in. You'll be glad that you read them in the proper order when you're done, and Ford's book is a wonderful resource and source of fun in and of itself, as well.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

So funny, so dark, so cynical, so angry. It was something of a bible to me during my “angry young man” years, and I still enjoy it.

The Shining by Stephen King

His masterpiece. He never wrote this well again. If his work is remembered 100 years from now, this is the book that people will still read. By the way, avoid the Kubrick movie like the plague. It gives away just enough of the book to ruin it for a potential reader, and yet strays so far from the story itself that it basically just ruins it. This is, to my knowledge, the only time a Kubrick movie fell short.

Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard

Pure pulp, pure enjoyment. I grin from the first page to the last.

Communion by Whitley Strieber

The scariest book I’ve ever read. This book still gives me nightmares. It’s about alien abduction, a topic I always thought was a little silly before I read this book. My friend Jamie dared me to read it, assuring me that it would scare me. I read it to prove him wrong, and instead, I proved him right. This book terrifies me. It made my list purely on the strength of Strieber’s prose. It’s scary, scary stuff.

Modern Manners by P.J. O’Rourke

The funniest book I’ve ever read. What a rich, brilliant send up of our self-destructive society. I literally bray with laughter every time I pick it up and flip through it again. It's so funny, so vulgar, and so dead-on with what it has to say about the way we've become.

Now I'm supposed to tag five other bloggers and suggest that they post their own responses to this topic. I don't want to do anything that even smacks of a chain letter, though... so I'll be a coward about it: If you're reading this, consider yourself tagged.

Wendy's list, titled after a terrible Moxy Fruvous song, is pretty good, too.