Books tag

Michael tagged me to do this thing about books. This is difficult as I am barely literate. So here goes:

Total number of books:

I don't know. I don't know if this is number of books I own or have read in a lifetime. But it's a few. More than 5, less than 5 million.

Last book I read:

Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (fantasic, wonderful, amazing, glorious, captivating)

Last book I bought:
Junko Mizuno's Pure Trance (so that I could understand what my new toys are all about, but the comic is so bizarre that I actually understand less no that I'm in the middle of it).

Five Meaningful Books (important to my life, in no particular order):

1. Bram Stoker's Dracula because I am a vampire buff (but no, I don't file my teeth and drink blood and such). This is a classic for so many reasons.

2. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is my favorite novel. Perversions and stigma aside, it's simply a beautiful and heartwrenching love story.

3. Koushun Takami's Battle Royale isn't really a great novel, but it's a freakin' great riff on The Lord of the Flies and it made for one of the greatest films ever made, Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale. This is one of the rare cases in which the film is far superior to the original novel. That movie kick-started my insatiable obsession with contemporary Japanese cinema.

4. Tie: Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Anais Nin's Henry & June turned the everyday act of keeping a diary into the creation of literature. Plus, they left in all the good naughty bits!

5. Dita Von Teese's Burlesque and the Art of the Teese/Fetish and the Art of the Teese for all the reasons that I would have never expected. I bought this out of curiousity, and it turned out that Dita is my hero. Yes, Dita is beautiful and the photos are stunning, but there's a heck of a lot more to it. Instead of making me feel like a lumpy, bulbous slab of blubber like usual, Dita makes a very strong argument that beauty is an illusion that you can create. She states that she works very hard to look like she does, that beauty is not necessarily effortless and that every woman can achieve beauty with a little patience and a lot of hard work. Instead of feeling grotesque and inferior, this book actually boosted my self esteem a tiny bit which is no small feat. I generally feel like a female, semi-human version of Jabba the Hut. Dita made me feel like an attractive woman, or at least potentially attractive. I'm forever a Dita fan and I can't recommend this gorgeous book enough. I know this is more of a photo book that a novel, but I don't care.

I tag anyone who feels like doing this. This was time consuming which is good cause work is making me insane today.