Oh NO! Not BOOK TAG!
I knew it was bound to catch up with me sooner or later after I saw Tom Knapp get hit with it. Book tag is rapidly spreading through the libertarian blogosphere like an intellectual version of venereal disease. I’ve caught it from Kevin Carson. I’ll try to answer the questions.
Total Number of Books I Own: I’ve owned several hundreds over the years, but it always seems like every time I move that I have to give up a number of them just for the sake of coping with the logistical burden imposed by my packrat tendencies. Currently my collection numbers around a mere 35 or so.
Last Book I Bought: That would be, I believe, “Learning Python” by Mark Lutz and David Ascher.
Last Book I Read: Peter J. Carroll’s slim but fun text on Chaos Magick: “Liber Kaos”
And, okay, I was actually re-reading it. I did say it’s a fun book.
Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me: Damnably, this question seems to disqualify most of the tech books I own or have read. A good tech book is notable for not standing out in retrospect — as you read the book, the book as literature recedes from your overt consciousness and you just learn. At the moment, after some thought, these are the five books that come to mind when asking myself which books have had a capital “I” Impact on me.
“For a New Liberty” by Murray Rothbard — This is the book that introduced me to the modern libertarian movement. While previously cynical and having an anti-authoritarian bent, this one book made me consciously libertarian. It shook me to my foundations and altered the course of my life.
“Anthem” by Ayn Rand — True, Rand had her flaws, but I found this book very emotionally moving. Reading it about a year and a half prior to picking up Rothbard’s book above primed me for it.
“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein — Heinlein’s books filled my teenage years. It fails to do justice to his influence on me to name only one of his books here — yet it wouldn’t be an accurate picture of who I am to only name my five favorite Heinlein books, either. While my own father passed away when I was very young, I found what fatherly guidance I could glean from Heinlein’s wisdom.
“Magick Without Tears” by Aleister Crowley.
“The Probability Broach” by L. Neil Smith — If Rand primed me for Rothbard — the works of L. Neil Smith, of which this is only a sample — were the final, fixative agent that set certain patterns permanently in my soul.
I still feel cheated by being restricted to only five, though. There’s so much worth mentioning. Science-fiction by Spider Robinson and Poul Anderson. Innumerable great libertarian works. So MANY Heinlein books. So many tech books! At the very least, I ought to at least mention Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary as well as “Modern Magick” by Donald Michael Kraig. “The Complete Idiots Guide to Starting Your Own Business” by Edward Paulson and Marcia Layton. Lest I incur the wrath of Eris, I simply must mention “Principia Discordia,” of course.
The list just goes on and on and on. Complicating matters much further, of course, is the fact that I do the vast bulk of my reading online these days.
Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs: This is problematic in that so many have already been infected. Of the people whose blogs and blogging I like, for several I don’t necessarily have email addresses to give them a courtesy “heads up”. Likewise, several people that I’d want to run this by don’t even have blogs. Even so, here are my picks.
Roderick Long
Ali Hassan Massoud
Mike Renzulli
Yazad Jal
Mike
[...] upcoming film Serenity, it’s about books, actually. Yaza Jal of Bombay has brought book tag to the Indian blogosphere, and at least one commenter is now going to read David Friedman&# [...]
[...] « Moral Quandry Book Tags I have been infected with what the blogger who infected Yazad calls the ….. intellectual version of venereal disease. And [...]