Book meme

Absolute Vanilla has tagged me for a book meme.

1. Total number of books owned

I should have an inventory because I owned a bookstore, but I confess that our new system to inventory books never got a chance to get the job done. It was a USED book store, which means we got the books our customers traded in, then priced and shelved them. The very expensive inventory system had to wait until we started making enough to pay for it, but the very unfriendly economy didn't give us enough time to get all the books into the inventory before we closed the store. Great fun while it lasted, but I now have four (yes, FOUR) storage bins full of boxes of books. How many? I don't have a clue. May I just say THOUSANDS and let it go at that? At home books fill the shelves and, yes, breed not just more books but more PILES of books. And there are piles of books on every flat surface, including the floor. Thousands, yea thousands more! Have I read them all? No, of course not, but I'm trying!

2. Last book bought

I rarely buy one book at a time, so this is like trying to remember the last potato chip I bought. Hmm, let me see, The Assault on Reason by Al Gore was among the last books I bought.

3. Last book read

This is a little easier because, even though I have several books going at any one time, I finish them one at a time. The most recent two books I completed were Merle's Door by Kerasote and I Never Saw Paris by Harry I. Freund. I'll have both books reviewed by tomorrow evening.

4. Five books which mean a lot to me

Time and Again ~ by Jack Finney
The Social Construction of Reality ~ by Peter L. Berger
Honest to God ~ by John A. T. Robinson
The Altered I ~ by Ursula K. Le Guin
Gnostic Gospels ~ by Elaine Pagels
Ishmael ~ by Daniel Quinn
To Love as God Loves ~ by Roberta C. Bondi
Worlds in Collision ~ by Immanuel Velikovsky, 1950
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity ~ by Hyam Maccoby
Stranger in a Strange Land ~ by Robert A. Heinlein
Agape Love ~ by John Templeton
Genesis Revisited ~ by Zecharia Sitchin, 1990

(Five, a dozen, who cares? You do? So sue me.)
I'm tagging anyone who wants to do this meme.