Good n' Tagged

After a long spell of somnolence, the Toad is rearing its ugly head again. The Resident Economist is ultra-super-busy, simultiferously wrapping up her thesis and looking for a job. Various long-term vanity projects such as committing all of SOWPODS to memory and writing a suitably impenetrable novel have been unceremoniously shunted to a siding. Meanwhile, the unspeakably tedious task of filing my tax return, hitherto manfully ignored, has with the onset of March begun to beckon me grimly, like, um, a grim beckoning thing. All in all, it looks like being an eventful month here at Coffee Shack Headquarters.

So, naturally, I've decided to write something for my blog. The faithful Ludwig has even been so kind as to suggest a topic for said effluvium. I believe it's called a tag.

Total number of books I own

Roughly 1300 here in Princeton, plus another 1000 odd in Trivandrum. The former number includes the RE's collection of works in Bangla, which are (ahem) as a closed book to me. The latter number includes my Dad's collection of art books (large) and books in Malayalam (larger). Strip all those extras out, and you're left with approximately 2000, all told.

Last book(s) I bought

1. Spin -- Robert Charles Wilson
2. The Youngest Miss Ward -- Joan Aiken
3. Blue Highways -- William Least Heat-Moon
4. Trawler -- Redmond O'Hanlon
5. The Book of Arthur -- ed. John Matthews
6. New Sherlock Holmes Adventures -- ed. Mike Ashley

Last book(s) I read

Hmm, this is proving a surprisingly difficult question to answer. I think it's because the three books I'm currently reading (see below) are all fairly hefty tomes (500-odd pages each), and I'm on track to finish all three of them roughly simultaneously, so that adds up to nearly 1500 pages of prose since my "last" book completion. Which is long enough for me to have forgotten just what it was that I last read. But it's probably one of these:

1. Samarkand -- Amin Malouf
2. The Dream of Scipio -- Iain Pears
3. The Perfect Storm -- Sebastian Junger
4. Going Postal -- Terry Pratchett

Books I am currently reading

1. Tell Me No Lies - John Pilger
2. Collapse -- Jared Diamond
3. Lempriere's Dictionary -- Lawrence Norfolk

Books I really enjoyed / that really influenced me

I'm going to steal pay tribute to Falstaff's idea and split the answer into categories. Also, I've chosen to restrict this list to books I read in school, since these are arguably more "formative" than more recent reads. Yes, I agree, it's somewhat arbitrary, but then, so is this entire game.

Fiction
1. The Hobbit / TLOTR / The Silmarillion -- J. R. R. Tolkien
2. Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
3. 1984 -- George Orwell
4. To Kill a Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
5. The Complete Sherlock Holmes -- Arthur Conan Doyle
6. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series -- Douglas Adams
7. The Wind in the Willows -- Kenneth Grahame
8. Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner -- A. A. Milne
9. The Asterix series -- Goscinny and Uderzo
10. Pretty much anything by Wodehouse, Twain, Asimov, Clarke.

Non-fiction
1. History of the World -- Plantagenet Somerset Fry (Hamlyn ed.)
2. Cosmos / The Dragons of Eden / Broca's Brain -- Carl Sagan
3. 1066 and All That -- Sellar and Yeatman
4. The Joy of Lex -- Gyles Brandreth
5. Pretty much anything by Gardner, Asimov (again).

Playwrights and Poets
1. The Wasteland -- T. S. Eliot
2. Almost anything by William Butler Yeats
3. Almost anything by Dylan Thomas
4. Macbeth -- Bill Shakespeare
5. Poetry 1900 to 1965 -- ed. George Macbeth

Books I plan to buy next

1. The Codebreakers -- David Kahn
2. The Illustrator and the Book, 1790 to 1914 -- Gordon Ray
3. Thud! -- Terry Pratchett
4. The Golden Fleece / The White Goddess -- Robert Graves
5. The Avram Davidson Treasury -- Avram Davidson

Books I own but have not read

Gosh, far too many to list in a single post. But here are some recent acquisitions which I plan to read Real Soon Now:

1. The Marsh Arabs -- Wilfred Thesiger
2. Maximum City -- Suketu Mehta
3. Sowing the Wind -- John Keay (as soon as the RE finishes it)
4. The Historian -- Elizabeth Kostova
5. Fevre Dream -- George R. R. Martin

Finally, an added bonus category:

Books I have never read and likely never will

1. Anything by Ayn Rand
2. Gone With The Wind
3. A Suitable Boy
4. Any book that has to do with cheese-moving, men & women and their respective planetary origins, chicken soup, rich and poor dads, astrology, or Terry Goodkind. (I tell a lie. I did, in fact, read one book by Terry Goodkind. It was quite enough.)

And, to make the tag game complete,

People I am passing this on to

This one's easy: AC, Zem, Jaggida, Fyshface and The Rube.