Well Bloggers4Labour tagged me, so I will try to rise to the challenge…

1) Total number of books I’ve owned

Its hard to tell. A few years ago, in a moment of clarity, I got rid of a huge box of Star Trek books, and have lost a few along the way, and we gave most of my cooking books away.

At the moment I have these:

These:

These:

A few of these:

And about 50 travel and language books stashed in a cupboard.

I can’t really be bothered to count!

Some of those books belong to the Mrs. so I am taking a rough guess that I have owned maybe 1500 books and still have about 1400 of them.

2) The last book I bought

All Fun And Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye by Christopher Brookmyre.
I have been recommending Brookmyre to anyone who will listen. Some of the reviews compare him to Carl Hiassen, and I can see what they mean – action, comedy and satire all rolled in together. When he gets into a rant (like the one about SSCs [*]at the start of A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away) its like vintage Ben Elton.

3) The last book I read

Was the Brookmyre one. Before that I was re-reading a load of old SF books and I think I had just finished all the Ben Bova ones, ending up with the Exiles trilogy.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me

a) Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
When I bought this book about 15 years ago I think its fair to say that it blew my mind. I only bought it because I quite liked Escher’s drawings, but it turned me on to JS Bach and for a while I even understood Godel’s theorem of incompleteness. It is not an easy reas in parts, but its extremely rewarding.
A few of the images from the book will stay with me forever, like the idea of an ant nest having an intelligence of its own, with individual ants acting like the neurons in a brain.
Anyone who can mix Alice in WOnderland, artificial intelligence, classical music, art, and mathematical theory together and make the whole thing readable deserves a Pulitzer prize, and Hofstadter won one for this.

b) The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time by Mark Haddon.
This means a lot for all the same reasons it meant a lot to a great many people, but for me it had an extra dimension: one of our boys was born prematurely and as a result has a mild learning disability. He is a lovely child, very polite, thoughtful and generous, but sometimes he behaves erratically or has a sudden flash of temper. It can be hard to relate to him on one of his off days, but this book, written from the perspective of a child with a mental health condition helped me to stop and try to see thing from the boy’s point of view. I am still no closer to understanding what his though processes are, of course, but I am a lot more aware that all his actions will have a reason which is, to him, a very good reason, even if there is no way we are likely to understand it.

And to think that I only picked the book up because of the Sherlock Holmes reference in the title, which temporarily revived my Sherlock Holmes fixation from the 80s – the one which resulted in me still having about 50 Holmes related books on the shelves.

c) Reasons To Be Cheerful by Mark Steel
To be honest it was a toss-up between this and Things Can Only Get Better by John O’Farrell, but someone else already did that one! Both books are about growing up left-wing in a right-wing country, and both have countless incidents which anyone who has been involved with the Labour party or movement can identify with.
I actually feel a bit guilty reading these, and think ‘why wasn’t I doing that much?’. Over the period covered by these books I was living in inner London mostly but had nowhere near as much involvement in politics at the time, but I can remember the feelings at those elections. These books let me relive my relative youth in a way that only This Is Uncool and Lost In Music have managed, although they did it with music instead of politics.

d) The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
This was the first Banks book I read, and it means a lot to me because of its general strangeness and the surprise ending, but mostly because of that scene. If you have read the book you will know what I mean. Before reading this book I was worried that maybe I was becoming desensitized to violence through various books and films, and was feeling a little jaded. At one specific and nasty point in this book I was actually shocked and revolted, and was so pleased to find that I still had the ability to be shocked and revolted. Few other authors have managed to write a passage where if it was a film you would look away – in fact reading the book you still look away, but unlike a film time has not passed in the story while you were not looking and you still have to face what you turned away from.

At this point I am supposed to tag someone else, as Bloggers4Labour put it:

So, who to tag now? It gets harder to tell who’s already been ‘got’, but I’ll select (erm…) thimble, Andrew Brown, Skuds, Cloud, and Jonathan.

Since then more people have been got, and I didn’t know many people to start with…

So how about Danivon, Bob Piper, Crawley News, Dave Bodimead and Cramlington Village Councillor as they are all blogs I have enjoyed at one time or another.

[*] The first S stands for “sad”. The second S stands for “suburban”. I will leave you to guess what the C stands for.