Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

tag meme

Angelo of Sauvage Noble tagged me in a way. And I respond in kind. The questions of a book meme follow:

1. The total number of books I’ve owned—Somewhere between 2500 and 3000. This is based on a quick per row per shelf average in my library and my office. Linguistics works make up a little less than half of that number, with film, philosophy, and history making up the remainder.
2. The last book which I bought—I think it was The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, but at nearly the same time I also ordered The Complexity of Cooperation also by Axelrod and The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism by J. Hoberman.
3. The last book which I read—The one which I finished last was Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.
4. Five books that mean a lot to me—This is a tough one. At this moment in time, they are:
1. Time Must Have a Stop (1944) by Aldous Huxley.
2. From Off This World (1949) by Leo Margulies and Oscar Friend. Mainly for the two short stories by Stanley Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey” and “The Valley of Dreams” (both 1934).
3. The Story of Language (1949) by Mario Pei was the first popular linguistics book I can remember reading, but perhaps the honor should go to Leonard Bloomfield’s Language (1933). Although, Sapir’s and Jespersen’s books of the same title (1921 and 1922) were not far behind.
4. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) by Richard Hofstadter.
5. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) by Douglas Hofstadter.

Then you’re supposed to tag five blogging friends to further the meming. Angelo tagged his entire blogroll, and I’ll leave it at that.