the smedley log - suburban scrawl

As Endangered Waterfowl

I’ve been tagged herein on the book meme that is ravaging all blogdom. I’ve never contributed to a blogospheric meme, so I hope I don’t shoot my eye out…

1) How many books to I own?

Along with my wife (Howard’s sister), we probably own about 800 books, not including about 300 children’s books.

2) Last book I bought?

Catholicism for Dummies. I have been interested in Roman Catholic thought and practice for some time, and have recently been giving serious thought towards joining the Church.

3) Last book that I read?

Well, I’m currently reading the aforementioned Catholicism for Dummies, which is quite good. I am also currently reading Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, inspired by my cohorts over at The New Pantagruel forums. This is a 16th century anti-materialist satire that is quite difficult to describe—something akin to Monty Python’s Flying Circus for late medievalists. The last book I actually completed was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. And no, 1987 was not the last time I read a book to completion. I’m just a little late in getting to the important ones.

Oh, I do want to second Howard’s recommendation of The Professor and the Madman. A concise, outstanding, and moving true story.

4) Five books that have meant a lot to me?

It’s really tough to choose only five, but here goes…

I. The Holy Bible. It continues to be the foundation upon which all my thought is built… or at least so I think!

II. The Problem of Pain, by C. S. Lewis. A great comfort to me around the time my mother became gravely ill and later died.

III. The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis. A very satisfying total picture of redemption and its opposite.

IV. Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton. It’s really, really hard to pick just one of Chesterton. Herein he describes the romance of faith—that was a new concept for me, and now it has become an old, familiar one. Chesterton would have something interesting, insightful, profound, and life-altering to say about bat poop.

V. The Best of A. W. Tozer. If evangelicalism had spent more time listening to him and less time merely revering him, I would probably still be evangelical.

Honorable mention: Everything else by Lewis, everything else by Chesterton, Thomas A Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, Huxley’s Brave New World.

5) Tag five people who haven’t played?

Most of my regular reads have played recently or been tagged by Howard below or Eric at Ales Rarus, so how about 2?

– Joe at Joe Missionary—he was tagged for movies but not for books…
– Rand at A Form of Sound Words—A raging fundamentalist, with whom I disagree vehemently on almost everything. But, hey, at least we have something worth disagreeing about.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

This book totally fascinated me when I read it in college and I always wish he would write an update for the new surge in 24 hour news channels. I may need to pull it out, dust it off and read it again. Another book I read on this subjest was Robert Entman’s Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics, which while I didn’t agree with many of his conclusions, it was a worthwhile read.

Yes it is interesting that Postman really criticized the more “important” sort of shows (60 Minutes, Sesame Street) than he did the “Three’s Company” sort of tripe, which he seemed to consider rather harmless. Yes, things have gotten much worse in this regard with more TV than ever considering itself to be “important”—and I s’pect 24 hour news (which obviously entails making non-news news on less newsy days) would be set square in his sights…. I believe it was Thoreau who, when asked, “How can you live up there without the newspaper?”, replied “I’ve already read a newspaper.”

Cheers!

Thanks for playing Steve.

I didn’t actually expect people to answer this meme (I’ve explained to a few of them that I really don’t see myself as the “meme type”), so it’s neat to actually see answers.

I would have put that Lewis book you and the wife got me (Surprised by Joy) or Mere Christianity in the list of five, but I was trying to represent the influences of my entire life to date, and I didn’t have the initiative to create the “honorable mention” category

-for that matter, I would have taken a page (or a book, maybe) from Bob’s list and used one or two of the Chronicles of Narnia—I still don’t know how they completely slipped my mind. Must be the effects of time.

[…] 8230; (Incidentally, I’d also like to read answers on these from my brother-in-law (answers here) and my newly re-connected buddy Bob(answers here, in the comments) […]