Please ignore this off-topic post

I've been book-tagged at Blogfonte and now need to be a be a good sport. So, move along now, nothing much of ACW interest here, folks.

Number of Books I Own - About a thousand, excluding review copies.

Last Book I Bought - The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Brooks. This classic has just been reissued.

Last Book I Read - Let's say "completed." Fooled by Randomness, The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Taleb. A witty, cultured attack on modern portfolio theory.

Five Books that mean a lot to me:

The Homilies of Saint John Chrysostom (multivolume). This is comprehensive exegesis. Miraculously valuable - a lot of the volumes are downloadable online.

The Chronicles of Henry of Livonia. A favorite of my late mother. A crusader's diary well connected to the foundation myths of both parents' family histories.

Order and History (multivolume) by Eric Voegelin. The problems of historic existence, meaning, and self-representation "in a nutshell." Shortly after I read Volume I in Riyadh, Israel and Revelation, a wise old sheikh regaled me (and my Riyadhi co-workers) with an impromptu talk on order in history and the meaning of personhood in the duration of the historic cycle. Volume II, The World of the Polis, I read under a lemon tree on Cyprus. So many immense ideas cascading so quickly ...

Sherman's Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865 by Sherman, Berlin and Simpson. I made the mistake of starting to read this 1,000-page opus in the conventional way, then put it down in shock when I realized that this was my gateway to personally experiencing the Civil War - at epic length - entirely through Sherman. When I can have a week with no interruptions or distractions whatsoever, I will subsume my consciousness in Sherman's.

Some of my father's verse was collected by admirers and published in St. Petersburg last year; it sits unread on my shelf. His poetry is bootlegged, photocopied, and anthologized - he's enjoying quite a boom - but I can't read Russian.

Now it's my turn to tag Chris Cross, Dave at Red Georgia Clay, Temperance Blalock, Jenny Goellnitz, and Mrs. Stone, if she's still rolling.