I've Been Tagged. Or Memed. Or Something Like That.

Esquire has passed the baton to me, so to speak.

1. Total Number of Books I've Owned: I would guess circa 500-600. That's not counting books from my childhood, only a handful of which have survived.

2. Last Book I Bought: The Oxford Book of Regency Verse 1798-1837 (ed. H.S. Milford, 1928). I had been thinking about getting this book for a couple of years, and I finally found a near-perfect copy for a reasonable price, and I acquired it a week ago. This past weekend was beautiful here in the Mon Valley, and I took this book with me when I rode my bike a couple of times down to the municipal park on the river, a few blocks from home.

3. Last Book I Read: South Park Conservatives. The author, Brian C. Anderson, was kind enough to send me a copy a few weeks ago, and I finally finished it last Friday. A very fine read! I'll try to work up a review. (I even took notes while reading.)

4. Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me:

1. The Red Hat, by Covelle Newcomb, a biography of Cardinal Newman that I read when I was a senior in high school. It made a very deep impression on me, and I must say it played a role in my joining the Catholic Church a few months after I graduated.
2. Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. It was the first systematic treatment of Christian theology and apologetics that I read, when I was in college. It was the first of what would eventually turn out to be an entire shelf full of Lewis books in my possession.
3. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I have read this book 15 times; it is a great work of mystical theology. (Lewis's Space Trilogy would be a similar runner-up.)
4. The Poems of St. John of the Cross (third edition), tr. John Frederick Nims. It was given to me by my friend Fr. John J. Hugo, December 30, 1980; it sparked my deep and abiding love of poetry.
5. The Norton Anthology of Poetry (revised edition, 1975). This was the first really good anthology of poetry I ever owned. A superb selection, with excellent notes and glosses. I found a lot of poets there that I have come to love. (Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse [new edition, 1939] and his Oxford Book of Victorian Verse [1913] would be similar runners-up.)

5. Tag 5 people and have them do this on their blog. I will decline to do this, since I haven't been paying enough attention to know who has already been tagged.

P.S. Someguy is a little late to the game. :-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/23/05 08:37:54 PM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.