Late, late meme

From Meljean's blog, only about 3 weeks late:-

How many books do you own?

Several thousand, I'm sure, depending if it's my books or books in this house. A couple of thousand of mine alone, what with fiction and reference and veterinary and how-to on writing and so forth, not to mention several hundred books per child, and John's reference books and submarine books (by which I mean the sort of all-action Cold War thrillers that no woman in her right mind would ever read, and which always seem to have a submarine in them somewhere). Call it 4000 or so, as a random guess.

Last book I bought

A very eclectic batch from Amazon - a book of essays by Ursula le Guin (can't remember the title), "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee (read it before but wanted my own copy), "In My Dreams" by Monica Jackson, and the three Boudica books by Manda Scott (see below).

Last book(s) I read

Above-mentioned books by Manda Scott. She's an interesting author. She's a British veterinary surgeon, who began writing very gritty murder mysteries some years ago, and is now a full time writer instead. She's also a lesbian, a rock-climber, and a shamanistic dreamer. She occasionally writes very ascerbic columns in the veterinary press, which is how I first came across her - being a vet who writes myself, I was naturally intrigued. So I bought her backlist, and found the murder stories very interesting - they're set in the Scottish medical and gay communities. I know from personal experience that her descriptions of the veterinary world are very accurate, so can only assume that her descriptions of the gay community are too - in which case, as a dull monogamous heterosexual, I can only say that it sounds very tiring, moving in social circles where just about everyone might be, or has been, one's lover, or is the lover of one's ex-lover, or whatever.
I'd never come across shamanism as a valid modern belief system before, and I still don't think I have a clue what she's going on about with that, but it made me think. Anyway, what with one thing and another, she could hardly have better credentials to write the Boudica books, which are historical novels with a fantasy element, set at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain and dealing with events from, mainly, the British point of view. She's woven the historical facts, as we know them, with an invented tribal culture which relies heavily on elements of shamanism, such as dead ancestors influencing current events and animal spirit guides helping in battles, and does it all so convincingly that it reads as if she'd seen it all happen. Because she's a vet, the animals are depicted vividly but without sentiment, and the battle scenes and wounds are convincing to the -er- bone. Most of the characters are naturally and tenderly bisexual (is this something lesbian authors are particularly good at doing? as I've written before, Mary Renault's "The Persian Boy" opened my mind to homosexuality when I was a teenager, without me even realising it had done so), and the shamanism bits made the hairs on my neck stand on end. When I found myself crying about the death of a fictional dog that would have died 2000 years ago if he'd ever lived, I realised I'd been well reeled in. And she has a lovely writing style, too, and is accurate on period details. Wonderful books. Start with "Dreaming the Eagle", then move on to "Dreaming the Bull". I'm about to start "Dreaming the Hound."

5 books that mean a lot to me.

Tricky.

Before I was 10: the Narnia books, by CS Lewis, and "The Midnight Folk", by John Masefield - adventure and witches and treasure hunting and very good descriptions of food, set in the 1930s. (written in the 1930s, too, come to that - I never noticed at the time how hard the language was).

When I was a teenager: the Earthsea trilogy, by Ursula le Guin (now the Earthsea quintology, and I love the newer ones too). And LOTR, just because of the depth and breadth of imagery there. And "Cold Comfort Farm", by Stella Gibbons, because of the gentle surrealism of its humour.

And in adulthood: too many to count, or none, depending how I look at it. No one or two that stand above the rest, anyway. But I suppose that's like life: when you're an adult, your brain's so full of memories and links that single events just don't stand out with the faceted clarity that they did when you were younger. Or they don't for me, anyway.

And I'm not going to tag anyone else, because I was so ludicrously slow to do this that the rest of the blogoverse has moved on by now.