There’s a new meme floating around LiveJournal country, about books. I just did a book meme not too long ago, but the questions on this one are a little different, and it’s short enough that neither writer nor reader will lose much time over it. If this is your sort of thing, read on and enjoy. If not, I’ll catch you later…

1. Total number of books owned:
   Hoo, boy, impossible to say for sure without going to a whole lot of effort, since most of my collection is tucked away inside banker’s boxes down in the Bennion Archive (a.k.a. my basement). However, I would feel confident placing the number in the high hundreds, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it even reached or surpassed 1,000, especially if we’re counting graphic novels. I have a lot of books. I’m ashamed to say, however, that I haven’t read the majority of them. For a long time I was buying them faster than I could read them, and things kind of got out of hand. I’ve recently decided to cut way back on how many books I buy per year, use my local public library more, and sell off or donate the ones I know I’ll never touch a second time. It’s the right decision for a number of reasons, but I gotta tell you, it’s been tough to curb my ingrained habits, and it’s also felt really weird to become so conscious of how I spend my money…
2. Last book you bought:
   Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover. Hey, I’m nothing if not consistent.
3. Last book you read:
   The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger. Yeah, I know, everyone else on the planet read this one about eight years ago, but I’m always significantly behind the curve when it comes to the hot read of the moment. Refer to my earlier comment about “rate of buying” vs. “speed of reading.” For whatever it’s worth at this late date, I thought this book was a terrific work of journalism and I can fully understand why it became a sensation.
4. Five books that mean a lot to you:
   This category was tougher for me to answer than I expected it would be. I’ve long considered myself a literary kind of guy, but when I really think about it, I find that the fiction that means the most to me is usually of the filmed variety — movies and television shows, in other words. That’s not to say I don’t respond to literature — of course I do — but the literary experience usually isn’t as powerful for me as the cinematic. That may sound strange or even sad to some people, but it is what it is. Still, there are books that hold a personal meaning for me. Often the meaning has nothing to do with the books themselves, which for the most part are not what you’d call “quality literature.” I guess “meaning” comes as much from external circumstances as from the texts themselves. In any event, here they are:
   • Star Wars by George Lucas. I know, the Star Wars obsession is getting tedious and I’m sorry to keep bringing it up. Nevertheless, I have a pretty good reason for saying this book matters to me, and it really has little to do with my rampant fanboyism. In short, this was the first adult-level book I ever read. The style of the book’s true author, Alan Dean Foster (who ghostwrote this one for Lucas), is not especially elegant but it is very dense, vocabulary-wise, and as I read and re-read the book, trying to recapture the sense of wonder I’d gotten from the movie, I ended up building an impressive vocabulary that far surpassed my fellow eight-year-olds. I always did extremely well in vocabulary, spelling, and writing exercises, and I’m convinced this was at least partially because I struggled through a novelization of a movie I loved, even though it was really too advanced for my skills at the time.
   • Han Solo’s Revenge by Brian Daley. The second volume of the original “Han Solo trilogy” that was published in the early ’80s (another trio of books about Han was published in the late ’90s), this book matters to me because my father bought it for me just before he took me into the theater to see The Empire Strikes Back. Dad’s not a reader, and he rarely bought me books when I was a kid (that was Mom’s job). But as we walked along State Street toward the Centre Theatre one summer afternoon, we passed a store window filled with this latest Star Wars tie-in product. He turned to me and asked, “Do you have that one yet?” When I said no, he immediately walked into the store — I think it was a drugstore, or maybe a magazine shop — and plunked down $1.95. As I recall, I read about half of it while waiting in line to see the new movie…
   • Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Gene Roddenberry. This is going to sound really weird, but this so-so novelization of a so-so movie matters to me because it comforted me the night my parents and I thought my dad was having a heart attack. I was in the fifth grade when I was wakened by my mom in the middle of one horrible night. She was obviously trying hard not to alarm me, and was just as obviously spooked herself. I grabbed my book more out of habit than anything — in those days, I almost always had a paperback sticking out of my back pocket — and I read it while we waited in an eerily deserted emergency room. I was young enough that I was still able to concentrate on a book while my father was being monitored by an EKG, but I wasn’t oblivious. I knew what was going on, and I was scared. But I had my friends Kirk and Bones and Spock, and in the end everything was fine. Incidentally, it turned out my father’s heart was racing because he drank too much coffee (three pots a day, back then), not because there was anything wrong with him.
   • The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway. I hated Hemingway when I was forced to read him in high school classes, and he was out of favor with the literati when I was in college, so I don’t quite know how I came to even pick up this slim volume of short stories. However, I somehow ran across it, read it, and was stunned by the beauty I found within it. The story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in particular, said so much in so few words. It changed the way I thought I needed to write in order to really make my point. Even though I still tend to ramble, I am now far more conscious that the best way to say what I need to say is simply to say it.
   • Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Let’s set the scene: I was a freshman in college, awakening to the possibilities around me, filled with hope for the future and yet also prematurely cynical and bitter over events in my personal life. My family was being torn apart at the time by illness and long-simmering conflicts — a long story I’m not going to recount right now. Suffice it to say I was extremely confused and desperate, eager to be free and grown up and happy. I wanted to feel like all the shit in the world mattered, and I was despairing of ever feeling that way. And then I encountered these words: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” That made a kind of sense to me that no prayer, no scripture, ever has. It didn’t comfort me in the sense of making everything better, but rather by reassuring me that everyone struggles with wanting their lives to be about something, and that you can choose how you’re going to live. I have forgotten the lessons of Walden from time to time in the years since, but everytime I re-encounter this great work of a great and gentle mind, I react in the same way. I have a pocket-sized volume of Thoreau’s signature work in my desk at all times…
5. Tag 5 people to take this survey:
   This last question/category is better suited to the community atmosphere of LiveJournal than my stand-alone blog, and the truth is I don’t know five people I could inflict this upon, at least not five people who have blogs or other public forums. Maybe my buddy Cheno needs some material for his new blog? Aside from him, I can’t think of anyone…