On Being Book-Tagged

Anand has book-tagged me from 'Locana'.

Let me try to provide the info required:

The number of books I own:
A few dozens at my apartment in Pune, several hundred at my home in Kerala.

The laast book I bought:
'Millennium' by Filipe Fernandez Armesto.

The last book I read:
Same as previous; unfinished.

Five books that mean a lot to me:
Most entries here will be in collective terms - individual books are pick. And they are mostly books read long back, in more impressionable times!

1. 'Sanchara Sahityam' (Malayalam) by S.K.Pottekkat - a massive 3 volume collection of his travel writing.

2. The travel writings of Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux (especially the train journeys) and Peter Matthiessen ('The Snow Leopard').

3. The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

4. The Essays by Stephen Jay Gould (I am familiar with only a small subset of these; I intensely admire their polymathic sweep).

5. 'The Library of Modern Knowledge' a mini-encyclopedia that Reader's Digest brought out in the late seventies and which I got to read (with plenty of disinterested passion) while at school. Now, it is an antique piece!

Honorable Mention:
- 'Aitihyamala' (Malayalam) by Kottarathil Sankunni; A hugely-varied collection of folk-tales, legends, (fanciful) life-histories,... from Kerala, written down almost a century ago in a narrative style rarely equalled since for its economy and gripping pace.
- 'The Idiot' by Dostoyevky; because a good friend remarked that I remind of him of Mishkin!
- Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales; I used to love their sweet sentimentality and pathos.

Books I could not finish:
At the top of this long and sad list, I would put Feynman's Lectures. Let me renew a very old pledge to cover-to-cover them, sometime!

PS: I am not in touch with enough bloggers to book-tag more folks. Thanks to Anand for hooking me up.