1: Total quantity of books I own. Given that
Tons, that is.
At least, that's what I estimated when we recently moved -- 120 file boxes, weighing an average of 40 pounds each, plus the books in my office that I didn't move. The count is somewhere on the order of 3000 books, I think, most of which
2: The last book I bought. I'm thinking that the last time I bought books was at the bargain room of the Palo Alto Booksale, which is a sure recipe for something strange. If that's the case, then, the last book I bought would be this circa-1984 IBM Personal Computer Basic manual (olive-brown three-ring binding in a gray slipcover), which is a very near duplicate of the book I learned to program from.
3: The last book I read. "Read" is a very fuzzy word around the edges, particularly with nonfiction reference books that one's usually looking for answers in rather than reading cover to cover. The last one that I did anything close to reading through, though, is the ConTeXt-EN English-language ConTeXt manual, by Hans Hagen. I printed out the 300-odd-page pdf file and had it bound into a book a couple of years ago, and then a few months later a much-updated version came out.
4: Four books that mean a lot to me.
4.1. Viscous Fluid Flow: Second Edition, Frank White. This is one of the collection of engineering books that I inherited from my father, and one that has a few of his notes in it. It's also one that I use regularly in my own work, for looking up various equations and things, and has been for quite a while. The combination means that it's come to symbolize, for me, the less tangible engineering stuff I got from him.
4.2. LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, Leslie Lamport. TeX rocks my little desktop-publishing world. It's one of the things that introduced me both to open-source and to the joy of well-crafted software tools, as well as being an indispensable tool when I'm writing papers; it also later was my path into participating in open-source communities. This book is the one that I started with. (And it's autographed.)
4.3. Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh. This is one of the books that
4.4. Towards a Symbolic Architecture, Charles Jencks. One of the things that fascinated me about the Myst games was how everything was symbolic; all of the details were chosen to work with the larger shapes and meanings of things, and the design became a language for indicating connections. Ever since then, I've wanted to work that idea into real-world things. This book, which I came across much more recently, is about very much the same ideas, but in real buildings, and it's in many ways a how-to book as well as just illustrations of what's possible.
4.5. King's Peace, Jo Walton (
5. Tag five people to pass the meme to. As with others, I'll just pass this along to whoever wants to continue it.