Tagged by her sassiness.

Total books owned:

Must do some inventory here. Since we've moved south last year we haven't officially settled yet as more books need to be unloaded from boxes. And have them stamped too, just in case I want to donate some to the college library. No specific number here.

Last book I bought:

Carl Sagan's Contact the first print, not the one stamped with "Now a Major Motion Picture." Characteristic of Sagan's integration of human dynamics, extraterrestrial intelligence, and how religion plays (undoes) its part.

Last book I read:

Should I say, heard--The Best Christmas Ever by James Patrick Kelly. About the last man on earth and how his robots try to please him by celebrating holidays one after another.

For the real book with all the paper smell, the works--Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Kept me turning pages back and forth. Either Clarke is lousy when it comes to Rama's interior details or my spatial intelligence stopped growing by the age of ten.

Five Types of Books I Read:

1. Sci-fi. What would you expect an engineering graduate would read? You have your romance novels, I have mine.
2. Slipstream and Cyberpunk. Technically I'm not a virgin to these genres if you count Alice in Wonderland in it. But I still have to pay homage to Gibson's Neuromancer.
3. "World Lit" (quotation marks in a Ptolemaic sense, America being the center of the universe), the Allendes, Nerudas and Marquezes. As well as Arundhati Roy, Ben Okri and Wei Hui.
4. Interior design, architecture and art books. I like pictures, I like colors, I like photography, especially the nudes. Legal porn ha ha ha.
5. Comic books. Had to give up after graduation due to their exorbitant cost. Love lost and found.

Plus a decent collection of cookbooks. I didn't include engineering or management books by the way.

(Five) books that mean a lot to me:

I wish I wrote myself, or dared to explore more of what I have so far:
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Elephant Vanishes by Murakami Haruki

Something to remind me that I am a cellular organism and not a floating ectoplasm:
- Cosmos by Carl Sagan
- The Ultimate Hitchhikers' Guide by Douglas Adams
- Siglo: Freedom by various authors
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

For beauty
- White Hot by Tricia Guild
- The Kama Sutra, author unknown
- Dana's Manual of Mineralogy by Klein and Hurlbut
- Digital Photographer's Handbook by Tom Ang

My former greatness
- High Output Management by Andy Grove

Brainfarts
- Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis by Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld
- No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba Today by Medea Benjamin, Joseph Collins, Michael Scott
- Asian Drama by Seth King
- The Beginner's Guide to Ecology, author unknown
- Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco

I can be electric too
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

(Five) favorite Filipiniana books:

1. Warm Bodies 1 and 2 by various bloggers, for obvious reasons.
2. Rizal Without the Overcoat by Ambeth Ocampo. Somehow history became interesting.
3. Twisted (the first one) by Jessica Zafra. Angst is so 90's and this is its encapsulation. I challenge everyone to look back and not see Zafra in the present tense.
4. Viajero by F. Sionil Jose. Old school Filipiniana, like a dog-eared sepia photograph underneath a glass table.
5. Lexy, Nance and Argus by Oliver Pulumbarit. As if the author was a secretary beside me jotting down everything I've been and everything I've seen.

and
6. Recipes of the Philippines by Enriqueta David-Perez. Adds pirurutung and tajure to your vocab.

Something I've added,

Five books I'd rather sleep on but not as plump as a pillow:
1. Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice
2. All Anne Rice novels
3. The Famished Road by Ben Okri, tied with Metamorphosis and other stories by Franz Kafka
4. Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling
5. And anything Harry Potter, until the hype dies down.

And books I'd like to have (a wishlist limited to five)
1. Damiana Eugenio's folklore series
2. An English translation of Urbana at Felisa and Si Nena at Si Neneng, if such works exist
3. The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh (not the version polluted by Disney, but the one similar to what I bought at the M/V Doulos and lost)
4. The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
5. Hinirang (does a hardcopy exist? the site is down)

I'll pass the baton to anybody who loves a meme.

This entry was posted by sky, on Wednesday, August 10, 2005. You can leave your response.