the booky meme
charlotte did this quite a while ago, and since i consider myself a bookworm, here goes:
number of books you own:
my private “library” i have in my room, probably around five hundred, about half of those are english. i gave away three boxes of books before my last move, because while i am really attached to my books even when i haven’t touched them for years there were a few that i really didn’t like and felt i could get rid of, some duplicates (either i got the original version after not being satisfied with the translation or someone gave me a second copy for christmas or whatever) and some were just books i felt i would never have another look at.
then there are maybe another two hundred books that somehow refer to my work, hobbies, art, architecture, maybe two dozen cookbooks and quite a few travel guidebooks.
last book you bought:
“after the wreck, i picked myself up, spread my wings, and flew away” by joyce carol oates. a powerful novel that tells the story of a fifteen year old girl who has to come to terms with the death of her mother and her own convalescense after a fatal car accident she feels guilty of having caused. while i think j.c.o. does a great job at seeing and telling this from the view of a teenage girl, i felt i was missing something. the girl’s pain and self-chosen isolation are very gripping and real, but some of her motivations remain obscure. maybe it’s been too long since i was fifteen.
last book someone else bought for you:
it’s a german book, “die profanen stunden des glücks” (that would be “the profane hours of happiness”) by renate feyl and it was given to me for my birthday by my friend katrin. it’s a fictional portrait of an actual person, the german writer sophie von la roche who wrote the first novel for women in germany in 1771. it think mrs. feyl’s writing does not make what one would call world literature, but it is a very entertaining book.
last book read:
i reread janwillem van de wetering’s “afterzen — the experiences of a zen student out on his ear”. it has been a couple of years since i bought and read it, don’t know what reminded me of it, but somehow i wanted to look at it again. van de wetering hilariously tells about his experiences and observations as a zen monk “in training” in several buddhist cloisters and the doubts about buddhist teachings that have dawned upon him over the course of twenty years in those places.
five books that mean a lot to me:
that is really hard to decide.
there’s a german children’s book called “in jedem wald ist eine maus die geige spielt” by gina ruck-pauquet. ehrm … the title translates to “in every forest there’s a mouse that plays the violin”. it’s the first book that i remember being read to from by my father. i still love her stories and look at them again now and then, they are funny, and loving, and trigger a lot of fantastic images.
my favorite book by john irving (who is one of my top favorite writers) is “the cider house rules”. i don’t know why this book means so much to me. it’s just beautiful, and sad, and funny at the same time.
then there are the complete works of e. e. cummings. that book is practically falling to pieces and bursting with bookmarks, i guess that says that i love it. i can wander around endlessly between his semicolons and parentheses and get lost in his words.
“little altars everywhere” by rebecca wells and its two sequels. i can only treat those as one, because it’s a continuing story, reaching back far into the past — a wonderful story about friendship and loss, childhood turmoils and abuse and how they determine our lives and relationships — that tastes of cajun spices and bourbon.
then, last but not least, there’s the elfquest comic book series. i own them for more than twenty years now and i can still live in those books for a day or so when i especially hate the world outside. and i owe them to someone who also means a lot to me.
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