Getting This Out of the Way

Besides, I was meaning to do an all-time ten.

1) The number of books I've owned?

I honestly don't think I can count that high. Not without doing a lot more work than I care to.

2) The last book(s) I bought?

Coming of Age With Elephants by Joyce Poole (excellent, BTW); The Astonishing Elephant by Shana Alexander (also good, although I've got a ways to read yet); The Fate of the Elephant by Douglas H. Chadwick; and Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants by Katy Payne. (I'm doing research, can you tell?)

3) The last book I read?

Really, it's the Poole book mentioned above; but before that it was Black Juice. Which, wow.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me: (in no particular order)

Screw five. Here's ten twenty.* I could go for more, but I'd still be leaving some out:

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. Mama Day, Gloria Naylor

3. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

4. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

5. Slow River, Nicola Griffith

6. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar

7. Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen

8. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Jon Lee Anderson

9. Black Glass, Karen Joy Fowler

10. Beloved, Toni Morrison

11. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

12. Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges

13. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree Jr.

14. The Poetic Edda, A Bunch of Dead Skalds

15. On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers

16. Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Jorge Amado

17. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

18. The Odyssey, Homer

19. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Mircea Eliade

20. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino