Book Tag

I've been tagged by Claire Wolfe.

Total number of books I've owned:
Are you kidding? How the heck would I know that? Same answer as everyone else- lots. All I can say is that anyone who can answer this with any reasonable accuracy is either obsessive compulsive or lying.

Last book I bought:
The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice by Phineas Mollod and Jason Tesauro. I bought it as a joke for a friend of mine who is becoming quite a ladies' man, but it is so funny that I've decided to keep it myself. This handy little reference manual covers such topics as how to date two women simultaneoulsy in a gentlemanly fashion, skinny dipping and strip club etiquette, the man cycle, flaskmanship, when to hide that you are lost and when to ask for directions, when and how to talk dirty to a woman, and proficiency in the fields of kink and fetish. In the store I opened at random to this passage which led me to buy it:

A well-rounded gentleman possesses a mature vocabulary, from sublime to inappropriate. Use profanity judiciously; four-letter words are not the only clever way to raise eyebrows. There's a high degree of cliche among cursers. Mix-and-match the filthy classics to create a string of fresh phrases that highlight your keen wit and local tongue. Proper timing and emphasis separate the nimble jawsmith from the colloquial fool.

Last book I read:
RebelFire 1.0: Out of the Gray Zone by Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman. (Review to follow in a separate post.)

Five books that mean a lot to me:
-How to Survive the Loss of a Love by Peter McWilliams, Melba Colgrove, Ph.D. and Harold H. Bloomfield, M.D. I've had an awful last two years, and this book really helped me through it.

-Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies by George H. Smith led me to stop calling myself an agnostic and start calling myself an atheist with no more ambiguity or wishiwashiness. Plus, it introduced me to the concept of justice entrepreneurship.

-A History of Pi by Petr Beckman. I learned a really good lesson about prejudice when I was a freshman in college. The professor of my first college calculus class spoke with a very serious speech irregularity and made a lot of apparently uncontrolled facial gestures while he taught. A bunch of other bratty smartasses and I sat in the middle of the room on the first day of class talking among ourselves, passing notes, and otherwise disrespecting the fellow. I am sure I was not the only one trying to figure out if I could get into a different section so that I could learn calculus from someone who could actually teach it. We were barely paying attention while Dr. Raskind somewhat haltingly discussed the various ways of approximating pi. But as he wrote his approximation on the board unaided by any notes or reference materials he caught our attention one by one. He filled about four lines across the chalk board with digits before ending up with "..." and then told us in perfectly clear verbiage that we could go to the back of this book to the appendix which listed the first ten thousand decimal places of pi and check him. He bet us a Coke that he was right. One of us copied what he wrote digit for digit and looked up the book in the library. Later on that first semester a few of us were in Dr. Raskind's office hours getting homework help and he grabbed a piece of paper out of his trash can to work out a problem on the back side. We took it with us when we left. On the other side was a page of his curriculum vita- he apparently was a former world record holder for memorizing the most digits of pi. As it turned out, he was an excellent instructor and many of those of us in his sections that first semester continued on with him through third semester calculus after which he was recruited away by another university. (Dr. Raskind, I owe you a Coke, an apology, and my sincere thanks for being the best instructor I've ever had plus a really nice person.)

-Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel story and pictures by Virginia Lee Burton was my favorite book as a kid. My burning question at the end of the book was whether or not a steam shovel could actually be used as the furnace of a town hall. I have to wonder if that wasn't the origin of my interest in thermodynamics. Regardless, Mary Anne was an inspiration.

-All things Mark Twain. No, that's not a book, but only because every last thing by Mark Twain has not to my knowledge been compiled into a single book. I almost missed out on the joy of reading Mark Twain due to Huckleberry Finn having been assigned in my freshman English class in high school. That is usually a death sentence for my interest in something. It wasn't until years later that I read a review of Huckleberry Finn by one of the deans of the College of Engineering in which I was enrolled which described it as a "decade book"- one that he goes back and rereads at least once every ten years. He described how each time he read it, he got experienced it in a completely different way. I reread it and thus began my love of Mark Twain and a substantial collection on the top shelf of one of my bookcases.

-The Inquisitive Cook by Anne Gardiner and Sue Wilson with the Exploratorium. I have a huge collection of cookbooks. I would guess that about half of all my books are cookbooks. But what I've never found is a book that explains how cooking works. Recipes tell you what to do, but why you have to do those things in the way the recipe says is rarely explained. My friend Steve gave this to me for Christmas to help fix that. The book has been great, and it led me to look up the authors on the web where I'm getting all kinds of other information. (Check them out at Ask the Inquisitive Cooks.)

There. That's 5 (+/- 20%).

Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs:
Redneck Feminist
Freeman, libertarian critter
Debra
I can't think of anyone else at the moment who both has a blog and has not been tagged. Steve, Megan, Erin, Misfit, or gdp, do any of you want to do a guest post on this blog?

Responses:
Misfit accepted.
Megan, having previously been tagged, declined.
Freeman, libertarian critter, having been double-tagged, accepted.
gdp accepted (see guest post).
Erin accepted (see guest post).
Redneck Feminist (aka drumgurl) accepted.

Yippee! I've made quota!