Thursday, June 16, 2005

My books

Answering thalassa_mikra's tag.

Total Number of Books I Own:

I counted over 250 books on my bookshelf here in Greece. This bookshelf dates back to 2000. There are many more books back in Sydney. Most of which are in boxes and some on a bookshelf in my folks' home.

Last Book I Bought:

Deadfolk by Charlie Williams. (It's in the mail.)

Waiting, in my Amazon.co.uk shopping basket, to be bought:

Granta 88: Mothers (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)
Platform - Michel Houellebecq
Heredity - Jenny Davidson
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Saturday - Ian McEwan
H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life - Michel Houellebecq
Six Memos for the Next Millennium - Italo Calvino

Last Book I Read:

A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee.
LOVED IT.

Five Books that Mean a Lot to Me:

Was reading about Italo Calvino and came across this appropriate quote from The Uses of Literature (1980). Calvino had written that there should be a time "in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same (though they do change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing."

The books that first came to mind as the books that mean a lot to me are the important books of my youth. (Many more came to mind than five, but since the question asks for five...)

Sartre Nausea.

Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure.

John Fowles The Magus.

Shakespeare Hamlet.

Sophocles Antigone.

4 Comments:

Blogger thalassa_mikra said...

Thanks Kathryn! You are most certainly a writer's book buyer, and reader too. Thomas Hardy, wow, I had almost forgotten my teenage attachment to Hardy, trying craft an image of his English countrysides with bare words.

12:29 pm  
Blogger kathryn said...

Oh yes, Hardy! I went through a stage where I only read Hardy. Everything Hardy!

12:50 pm  
Blogger Unknown said...

An interesting comment from Calvino and something to think about! As it happens, I'm currently reading the Calvino book and I'm looking forward to seeing the context. I wonder what I would go back to now . . .?

3:19 pm  
Blogger kathryn said...

I've often thought I'd go back to the Magus first. In fact, last summer a very old friend of my partner's came to visit with a copy of the Magus for me! My original copy is back home in Sydney. I did start it but I couldn't read much past the first page. Certainly it was a busy summer and not a quiet-good-for-reading winter, but I think it was more than that. I'm not ready to go back to it. What if all I felt back then when I first read it was an illusion! What if I don't feel the same way about it now?

Thanks for stopping by, Clifford.

12:24 am  

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