(extra gold stars to people who can work out why I'm using this as a title) Trish Wilson has been tagged for a blogger thing about books and since she a) asks people to hijack it b) I'm mad about books and c) I love the idea of a woman in thigh-high boots and a whip I'm going to borrow it.
Number of Books I Own
A lot. At least 500 in paper form plus (with duplicates) over 100 eBooks - the latter almost exclusively from Baen's webscriptions
5 books? Just 5 books? how about 5 authors? no? OK then.
Kipling's Stalky & Co - must be good because I know it practically by heart also when I was an inky schoolboy it gave me quite a lot of pleasure to identify myself with "Beetle" i.e. Kipling himself. Mind you I love many other Kipling books and sometime back reviewed "The Day's Work" which is probably my other favourite Kipling work
Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger - another one from my schooldays for much the same reasons as Stalky & Co. You may infer from this that my school days were not universally happy, though they turned out well in the end.
Heinlein's Starship Troopers - as with Kipling I find it hard to narrow myself down to one book, but since I want to spread myself I'll limit it to this one.You can credit ST for severely influencing my politics and hooking me in to other Heinlein books such as The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.
The Prayer Book of 1662 - I'm not religious any more but I grew up with this book (or its derivatives) being used every Sunday. Directly this book influenced me by the richness of its English and by the way my father admired it particularly compared to the ASB and other more recent C of E clappy happy crud. Indirectly it has influenced me and I would guess almost every reader of English prose published after it simply by existing.
Eric Flint's 1632 - Eric Flint published my story Hobson's Choice as part of the Grantville Gazette spin offs from this book. It it hadn't been for 1632 I wouldn't be a (kind of) published author.
If you note the lack of books set in the present day then that is no accident. I find most of them tedious in the extreme. I also find most non-fiction to be only temporarily interesting. Good historical novels or SF are timeless and frequently the stories are used to illustrate deeper truths.
Five Bloggers to Tag
Hmm... George at EU-Rota, Tim at At Englishman's Castle, The Easyjetsetter, T_Stormcrowe and umm, well seeing as I hijacked the meme maybe four is sufficient so I'll close with a quote from another book that I nearly added but didn't