Find the ironic distance from A to B using the Ecstatic Formula

I had all sorts of deep philosophical thoughts and advanced concepts that I wanted to discuss here, but then I thought, "Who the frell wants to read that?" So, instead, I gacked a happy little book meme. From fshk. At the end of hers, she said anyone who hadn't done it yet could be tagged. So I self-tag. I tag myself. I am large--I contain multitudes.

1. Total number of books I've owned:
Good grief, impossible to say. As a child, I had collected the entire set of Bobbsey Twins (from the 1960s), all the children's classics, the Little Golden Encyclopedia, all the Nancy Drew, all the Dana Sisters, all the fairy tales books you could imagine--Blue Fairy, etc.--and a load of the Whitman books such as the Donna Parker, Tarzan, and Lassie series (remember "Mystery of the Bristlecone Pine," which gave me a Jeopardy! answer the other night.) When I got to be fourteen or so, I came home from school to find that my mother had cleaned all that out. "Cleaned out" being a relative term. "Of course you didn't want to reread that baby stuff," she said. In her "defense." (ha) "I wanted to keep it for my kids," I wailed, knowing that I did want to keep that baby stuff. Several of the books were written in by those who had given them to me, and I knew that some of those people would soon be lost to me. She doesn't believe in that hogwash, so she wouldn't have listened to that. What she did say: "You're not going to have any kids." That prediction came true, but not for the reason she always cited ("No man will have you, you dirty-roomed, loudmouthed, strong-willed, FAT self-indulgent shrew!") I turned out to be infertile because of the pituitary problem that led to the polycystic ovarian syndrome and all that. But anyhow, I'm too old and tired to keep up with small children now. (And although I paid the fees to be considered by two adoption agencies, it turned out that hubby wasn't serious about wanting to adopt, so we wasted the fees.) However, I do think often of those books, and of my daddy's Encyclopedia Brittanica 1963, which he bought from a door-to-door salesman when we lived in Houston and he worked for NASA as a contractor (yes, he really WAS a rocket scientist--worked on fuel formulas and watched films of liftoffs of the large rockets to see what went wrong). He got them so *I* could have them, ostensibly, but he read every one of them sitting in his Daddy Chair after dinner at night or on weekends, and he wrote his name (Dal C. Gerneth) in every last one of them, in his tiny crabbed handwriting in the upper corner of the front cover. Blast it all that she got away with "throwing those out because they're out of date" when I was in college. History doesn't go out of date! They were still eminently useful! And, worse, she also threw away all his bow ties after he died the year I turned fifteen, and now I don't have a thing that was his except a couple of pocket handkerchiefs. But to spare my blood pressure, we shall go back to the original question.

(Yes, I can write like David Foster Wallace, but is that really a Good Thing?)

Let's guess we have a thousand books in the house now. Several walls are walls of bookcases. I have a bunch of them boxed up in the storage building. I'm afraid they'll get musty, but there's no room now that we have Mama's things in the room that I used to use as a study, which is fine, just means we have more stuff to deal with. I should go through and "weed out" books. Yeah, right, sure!

2. Last book I bought (not counted in the above total):
_Bras and Broomsticks_ by Sarah Mlynowski or however it's spelled, *because* we are studying it in my online "How to Write YA Chick Lit" class. It's kind of good, but I think the concept has been done quite often. Still, I write books with witches and fairies in them, so I like that. Torn so far. (Not the pages, the reader.)

3. Last book I read:
Like fshk, I usually have several going at once. I just re-read an Anne George mystery to see if my mystery snoop sisters are really as appealing as hers, and I decided mine were even more fun. (grin) They're not as snarky to one another as hers are. Browsed _The Know-It-All_ by A. J. Jacobs, which made me want those encyclopediae back. Found a good old-fashioned BOOK book titled _How I Paid For College_, which was full of sexual situations and dirty words but yet wasn't really ABOUT them, and was ABOUT some deeper issues, and read that. Reread _The Secret History_ the other day just to hear the cadences of the prose. Read some poems out of an anthology this morning.

4. 5 books that mean a lot to me: (not necessarily the only ones)
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (big surprise)
A Separate Peace, John Knowles (yep, it's been a while since I read it)
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut (I am a closet Bokononist)
The Boyfriend School, Sarah Bird (love the movie, too--saw it recently)
The Egypt Game, Zilpha Keatley Snyder (childhood favorite)

5. Five people to take up the meme and answer in their own lj:
Whoever reads this, hasn't done it yet, and wants to!