Book Baton
[Listening to: All Good Books - Paul Weller - Illumination (03:25)]
I was browsing the other day (as you do..), and decided to pick up the Book baton from if else:
Number of books on the shelf
Much to my surprise, it's a staggering 745! If I consider that in 1997 when I went travelling I sold almost every book I owned to raise money for the trip, these have mostly been bought in the 11 years I've lived in Italy, which means that's 67 books a year on average. Shame on me, but only 2 are in Italian...
Last book purchased
Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency, Michael T. Klare. I picked it up after reading number 5 on the last 5 books list.
Currently reading
Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson.
Last 5 books read
- Crypto: Secrecy and Privacy in the New Cold War, Stephen Levy. Hugely interesting, even if I will confess I didn't understand all parts of it.
- Chelsea's Century, Harry Harris. Dreadful. I say this reluctantly, as it was a present, but the fact that it was written by a newspaper journalist shows. It essentially reads as a whole bunch of newspaper articles bound into a book.
- A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson Fantastic. Science doesn't get any more understandable than this.
- Zanzibar, Giles Foden. A good read, and with the location a book I chose to take to the beach this summer.
- The End of Oil: The Decline of the Petroleum Economy and the Rise of a New Energy Order, Paul Roberts. Scary. When are people going to start to listen.
This is a hard one. I would probably include books that made an impression on me, such as Touching The Void by Joe Simpson and It's Not About The Bike by Lance Armstrong. One book I read this summer I'd read again was 23 Days In July by John Wilcockson. One I bought again after someone stole the first copy was A Man On The Moon by Andew Chaikan. If it was a book version of Desert Island Discs sort of thing, and I could only pick 8 to keep, these would be on the list, along with One Day In A Very Long War by John Ellis, which magnificently puts into perspective the true scale of WWII, something classic, such as Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, something not quite contemporary but not as old as Dickens, such as On The Beach by Nevil Shute, probably his most famous book, and lasty, as most of these are fairly serious, something to make me laugh, how about White City Blues by Tim Lott.
Passing along to...
Uh. No one. I'm not well connected in the blogosphere...
Comments