the blog quebecois

Oh, drat. This meme has been ricocheting around for the last week or so and I thought I'd ducked it but The Meatriarchy had me in his sights:

Number of books I own:

Probably three or four hundred, not counting textbooks and technical manuals.

Last Book I Bought:

A hardbound collection of Somerset Maugham's short stories that I found at a garage sale.

Last Book I Read:

The Face of Battle by the British military historian, John Keegan.

Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me:

Trying to narrow this down was taking me way too long. I think that the most important books that we read are the first ones, the ones that inculcate a love of reading. So here are a few categories and impressions:

Encyclopedias: One grandmother gave me a set of Encyclopedia Americana (I think that was its name), printed in 1935. The other grandmother, a bit more up to date, bought a new volume every couple of weeks of some encyclopedia offered by a grocery store for 2 bucks if your grocery order was above a certain level. So I know everything in the world, but only in alphabetical order.

Gulliver's Travels, by Swift. One of the first books I can remember reading, it was an abridged version included in a big book of fairy tales, Aesop's fables, kid-friendly rewrites of Greek mythology, etc.

Science fiction: I read science fiction voraciously, but got burned out on the genre in a few years. I remember H.G. Wells' The Time Machine fondly; there was another one by Issac Asimov, also on time travel, that I found fascinating. I'd need a for-real time machine to remember the title, though.

The Hardy Boys. Don't laugh -- I used to eat these up like popcorn. When I ran out, I'd start in on my sister's Nancy Drew novels. OK, you can laugh at that.

Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. Probably the first Serious Book I read, when I was thirteen or fourteen. It inspired me to become a tragic, moody Russian writer. That didn't work out too well, so I instead became a moody Canadian blogger who posts weird things he finds on the Internet. Kind of tragic, in its own way.

Tag Five More:

Everyone I can think of has already been hit up on this. I might as well shoot for the stars, and offer a group challenge to Huffington's Post. I'll bet they can't scare up three books among all of them.

(The picture above is via the Cynical-C Blog; it's part of a project by Livio De Marchi, who constructed an entire house out of books, or at least sculpted representations of same.)

Dick Pound, the Canadian head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, has a name that, shall we say, lends itself to some rather unfortunate connotations. Unfortunate, too, is the cover of his new book, listed on Amazon.

I guess it's safe for work. But what were they thinking?

Matthew Yglesias:

As some of you are probably aware, I tweeted something rather rude upon learning the news of Andrew Breitbart's death. Consequently, many of his many fans are unhappy with me. Fair enough. In consequence of that, many of them have decided to spam the Amazon page for The Rent Is Too Damn High with highly negative reviews that typically reveal that the reviewer has not even made a passing acquaintance with my views.

He posted this whiny screed at Slate. And yes, egged on by various bloggers like Ace of Spades, people are posting "reviews" of his Kindle ebook. I have no idea if it's any good -- I rather doubt it, judging by what I've seen of his blog. On the other hand, I'd gladly pay money for those reviews. They're hilarious. Here's my favorite:

I wasn’t expecting 20 pages filled with naked pictures of the author in various poses. I found the photos that included animals to be in extremely poor taste.

Many more here.