Another Book Meme

(I can't resist this sort of thing.) The Irish Elk tags me with a litter-chur questionaire I don't recall having seen before. Are you ready? Here goes:

1. Total Number of Books I've Owned. Difficult to say. I've never actually counted the collection. However, recently I did a quick calculation in my library based on number of books per shelf and number of shelves and arrived at a figure not far under 1000. Coupled with the books scattered about upstairs and in my Fortress of Solitude in the basement, I expect that is a pretty accurate figure.

2. Last Book I Bought: As I noted in an earlier post today, I picked up several volumes of the collected works of Charles Kingsley yesterday.

3. Last Book I Read: I am currently reading Winston Churchill's memoirs of the Second World War for the first time and am about two thirds of the way through The Gathering Storm. Wonderfully lucid - very much in the style of his History of the English- Speaking Peoples in terms of his ability to explain the big picture in simple terms.

4. Five Books That Mean A lot to Me: I'll cheat a bit and name five authors instead: Evelyn Waugh, Patrick O'Brian, P.G. Wodehouse, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Obviously, different authors (and different books by those authors) have different kinds of meaning. And there are plenty of other names that deserve inclusion on the short list. I picked this lot primarily because I find myself coming back to them again and again.

5. Tag five people and have them do this on their blog.

Kathy - Isn't this sort of thing just made for us?
Sadie - Time to pull your nose out of the law books.
JohnL - Here's another chance to wax eloquent about Robert Heinlen.
Jordana - Because you tagged me with one of these the other day.
Chan S. - The first name in bookish (gardener) blogging.