Tuesday, June 07, 2005

paperback reader

as i watched this meme spread through the blogworld, i was wondering if i'll ever be tagged. suhail was the one who came out of the closet (no not that one..apparently he is a closet fan of my writing) and tagged me. since he also said nice things about my writing, i shall oblige...thanks for the tag, dude.

Total number of books I own: around 10 - 20 here, around the same number back home. after i discovered that there are places that give out books for free here, i stopped buying them..hey i'm just a student living in a not-so-cheap city. being frugal about things like books and lunch allow me to have the odd drink every day

Last Book that I Bought : must be that Calvin and Hobbes i got abt 2 years back, but i gave it away without reading..so it must be the lord of the rings i got in dec 2001 from odyssey, adyar...sigh

Last Book I Read : State of Fear , Michael Crichton sometime in Mar 05..got this and the selfish gene from the library, intending to multitask...took abt a day and a half for state of fear..selfish gene went back after 6 chapters because it was overdue and someone else wanted it more than i did

Books that mean a lot to me (at least five) :
what does this question mean anyway? if there was any lesson to be learnt from the books that i read, it was that i have to return them on time or pay a fine.. the ones that are listed here are the ones that got stuck in memory..there are others that i thought would make me seem geeky yet cool, bookish yet suave, smart and sexy all at the same time but they are all taken. damn all u bloggers who really read those books. most my posts are from the past , lets start from there :

the mystery of the stuttering parrot - the 3 investigators..jupiter jones, pete crenshaw and the bob guy kept me amused through many a summer vacation..but for some reason i remember more of this mystery than the others

H2G2 : cos its funny. i like to think my life is being run by mice...its much easier to give up and blame it all on them..i've only managed to read the first book in the trilogy and till the bit about elevators that knew abt the future from the second

lord of the rings : all that detail.i'm fascinated by really small,irrelevant details about anything. and am a huge fantasy/sci-fi fan. LOTR is easily the best combination of both these trivial interests of mine.

i,robot : a set of short stories each of which is a logically beautiful puzzle..i "solved" one of them as i was reading and am still patting my back for having done so . sci-fi rocks.

i'm finding it very tough to come up with a fifth book..i want to list 'ponniyin selvan' but i am still on the 4th book in that series and at the rate i can read tamil its going to take at least a year more to complete this and then the 5th book. i enjoyed reading the spy genre -ludlum,clancy and others- though none sticks out as being better than another. i also like some jeeves books, dont really remember any of them distinctly..i'll leave you with a couple of lines from one of them that i remembered and googled for..u have to get something in return for all this narcissistic crap :

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.
- from Ring for Jeeves

i've always been quite lazy , so if u've read this and are one of the few that are yet to post some form of this meme, by all means go ahead..in fact i'll even let you mention my blog as inspiration for the post

19 comments:

Suhail said...

so you were waiting for the tag, eh? makes me feel good....and the dirty deed is very likeably dirty indeed.. ;) btw, there are no rules..u can break or invent rules..
i, robot sounds like a good read..thx

Anonymous said...

ummm.. I'm gatecrashing, which I've wanted to do on your blog quite often. First, I remember that shakespeare-spouting parrot too.. to-to-to be or not to-to-to be turned out to be 222B, an address clue.. I was amazed at the brilliance of it then!
Second, what's meme? Please tell.

catcharun said...

answers.com, when i first looked it up, once said and still does :
meme - an idea which spreads(coined by Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene)
yup the same book i returned after 6 chapters.

222B,as you probably already know was not just any address.it was the address of sherlock holmes 222B baker street.it was brilliant.

thanks for gatecrashing though.

Anonymous said...

oh, well, i have one less sherlock holmes story to worry about now. i know, shocking-- i've not read them all.

C&H: i have only one and its one of my favorites. its kept me laughing through many lazy afternoons.

catcharun said...

a ha..do i know that only calvin and hobbes ??
damn i'm too generous :).btw i just lent it to u, expecting it back soon .. haha

what was that abt 1 less sherlock holmes? there wasnt any mention of a holmes story/book here..

Anonymous said...

fine... time to start drawing mush on calvin and spectacles on hobbes ;)

ok, i was only half awake when i posted the comment. i'll change that to jupiter jones and his friends

Anonymous said...

MWAAHAHAHAHAHA...
`Hyps

Anonymous said...

i accede.. the stuttering parrot will always be brilliant!
i kind of thought meme was part of internet slang and felt quite comfortable being out of it; but it's a real real word, with derivations and all. yikes! i feel like a dud. thanks for the link to answers.com, obviously a link i should have known about.

catcharun said...

anon : dont defile books...put your art on desks, walls and public transportation..u can even add a beard to calvin, but he is not going to grow up..
a quizlova recently told me that susie derkins is the only left handed character in the entire book..check that for me will ya?

catcharun said...

hyps: dont even go there..i'm going to have to learn programming and start writing my own programs for the powerpc in my powerbook

the upside is that a few years later, when everyone will have their pseudo-macs, i'll still be toting the WORIGINAL powerpc machine..the new intelli-MAC will probably be able to read minds and convert thought to email and all for under $199 but i'll still be able to use the "intel inside idiot outside" joke... so MWAHAHHAHAHA

Anonymous said...

a few years later, if you're lucky, ull be getting a couple of perichambazham in exchange for ur WORIGINAL WURASHT powerpc machine.

HOHOHOHO!

`Hyps

catcharun said...

prema : answers.com is quite an awesome tool.keep it handy. u'll need it when i spout unheard of facts and words in my posts. after google and answers.com my (in)credibility has gone for a toss

catcharun said...

laugh all u can man..i'll sell it on ebay for a tidy sum.
wait u mean to say girls will pay for a powerbook in dates..that too 2 dates. wow that makes it really close..2 dates from hot chicks or some cash from ebay ??
hmmm........

Subramaniam Avinash said...

why did you the brilliant one not manage to read richard dawkins, in full? i'm crushed. and here i thought you were a lot cooler than i thought.

Subramaniam Avinash said...

'meme' was not coined by richard dawkins. it was made popular by him.

catcharun said...

usual excuse - cos i didnt have the time, i still dont..cos some dope-fiend high on information keeps sending me a million links and i have to respond in kind

if this meme had another q for books u wish u'd read, it wud've given me an excuse to just keep updating one post all my life

umm..thats what answers.com says , but it also qualifies that definition as Obscure

Anonymous said...

cant prove or disprove if susie d. is a left hander from that C&H. (quizlova: cool blog!)

also, http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=meme

Anonymous said...

all right, i've got what it means... pandora's box huh? but there's hope. i bought a dictionary.

Anonymous said...

?