What I Tell You Three Times is True
advantage over the person who can’t read them.”
– Mark Twain
There’s this meme going around the “nearby” blogs - you write about something, usually answering a set of questions, and then you “pass along the challenge” to N bloggers around you. Talk about exponential meme growth. Here’s the ball Frostie passed me:
Name three books …
1. … you have read most recently.
2. … you have bought most recently.
3. … you would reread again.
1.1. Strangers in Paradise, a comic series by Terry Moore. It is hard to describe this, I think it is revolutionary in the way people are portrayed in a comic book - realistic to the last detail in both character and appearance. The topics swing from the mundane to the extraordinary, but all confined in a believable frame. It has sex in it, but it’s not about sex. It has relationships, but it’s not about relationships. It has conspiracies, but it’s not about conspiracies. I can’t describe it in any other way, but here’s what Gaiman has to say about it:
What most people don’t know about love, sex, and relations with other human beings would fill a book. Strangers in Paradise is that book. I have long suspected that what people did in private was much funnier than it ever was erotic. Terry Moore obviously thinks so too.
It has 106 issues, so technically I have met the requirements, but I’ll go on because I’ve read other interesting stuff as well :)
1.2. Freakonomics. It’s a book on how economic incentives affect everything around us, and how data mining can reflect trends and truths which are not visible in any other light. A sample from the book: What The Bagel Man Saw. Other topics include insider information on a crack cocaine gang (aka “If drug sellers are so rich, why do they live with their mothers”) and how legalizing abortion put a stop on crime in the US. (Wikipedia has more on the subject)
1.3. Spook Country by William Gibson. Every book from this man is a gem, this one is no exception.
2. I don’t buy many paper books lately, and I can’t remember three books I’ve bought last. One is “The Big Fat Kill” by Frank Miller (yes, a comic translated in Bulgarian), but I can’t name any other. Probably Pratchett or Bulgarian sci-fi.
3. I love rereading, and I have clear winners for doing so. One: Pratchett is an author who can never be read just once. I reread all his books, and there is always half a dozen of them I haven’t read since more than a year, so I can’t really tire of it. Two: Bujold’s Miles Vorkossigan series. I have read pieces of it when it was partially published in Bulgarian, then after having collected the entire Miles universe in English, I have read it twice. Give me a year and I’ll do it again, I love the little bugger and his ways of dealing with trouble. Third: the early books of Neal Stephenson. Zodiac and The Big U are for me much greater than his later books. I would read Cryptonomicon again, but his other books are too commertial or tiresome (I couldn’t reach even the midpoint of that crap about Newton). As a last third option ;) , I’ll point Douglas Adams, another very rereadable author whom I haven’t read since several years. Ahh, Had I but world enough, and time …
I hereby pass the meme snowball to:
Lady Thistle
Firefox (Hey, how come you’re not in the sidebar? Fixed.)
and The Mountain King