The Book Mobile

Number of books I own:

Hundreds, including textbooks, non-fiction, and fiction

Last book I bought:

The Life of Pi (Yann Martel) in the airport on the way back from MN. About an Indian (from India) whose family owns a zoo. They decide to close the zoo and are transporting the animals to zoos in America (they're moving to Canada simultaneously) when the container ship they are travelling on sinks. Everyone dies except the kid, Pi, who finds himself on a large lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra, and a tiger. A really interesting story about how he manages to survive more than a year at sea under unrepentantly unbelievable circumstances.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (Rowling) about this teenage kid who goes to magic school and who seems to be the target of an ongoing plot involving some bad wizards led by a guy name Voldemort.

Books I am reading:

Nothing right this minute though I have several in a holding pattern next to my bed. Right now I'm trying to wade through the magazines I'm behind on. Those on the holding pattern include Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth R. Miller and The Satanic Versus by Salman Rushdie. The former because I am endlessly fascinated by the science/religion debate, and the second because Salman Rushdie is a great writer and how many books result in a fatwa being called on you?

Last book I read:

See above books that I bought.

Five Books that mean a lot to me: I'm going to skew this to be books that are among the best I've ever read. I can't necessarily ascribe any sort of sentimentality to them, which I think the original topic implies.

The Lord of the Rings (Tolkein)
short guy gets magic ring and walks to a volcano to destroy it while the world almost goes to shit around him.

The Moor's Last Sigh (Rushdie)
impossible to summarize

A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson)
best science book ever

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)
Far more interesting than the title even hints at

The Ornament of the World (Menocal)
Enlightenment during the Moorish rule of Spain from 750-1492, a period of amazing tolerance and learning while the rest of Europe languished in the Dark Ages, only to fail with the reconquest of Spain by the wildly intolerant Christians, Ferdinand and Isabella. God they sucked.