Lowem on Books

Now, what is this? Spot has tagged me regarding some book meme. Hmm? What's a meme? If I remember right, it's something about an idea that somehow spreads through the popular culture. Let's see, step 1, look up "meme" on Wikipedia. Ah, I see, I'm quite familiar with the "All your base are belong to us" one (... and all your oil too, lol). According to memes.org, "Memes are Mind Viruses". Wikipedia also has a definition of memesphere, which sounds somewhat like a small subset of the blogosphere.

Okay, it seems relatively benign, and kind of interesting. Well, benign compared to the computer-based malware (viruses, worms, Trojan horses) that I have battled with. I will "answer" the call of this book meme, then :

How many books do I own?

Hmm. No idea. How do you count that? Are old, dusty textbooks from yesteryear counted? Non-fiction vs fiction books? "Coffee-table type" books? Only your "current working set" of books touched within the past, say, 2 years? Anywhere between 2 and 200 then, I'd suppose. It's made more complicated by the fact that I have one set at home, and the older ones back at my parents' place, and some of the sci-fi ones are sort of shared with my brother. So, the exact count is kind of hazy.

The last book I bought

Let's say we don't count the big chunk of children's books for Ken that Biow bought on my credit card, or the latest street directory, you know, this kind of thing. It should then be the 19th, and final book in the Star Wars New Jedi Order series, The Unifying Force. This marked the end of a 4-year journey starting from the first one, Vector Prime. Star Wars Episodes 7, 8 and 9 might never be made, but these books, together with Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy series provide more than ample material for the Star Wars "Expanded Universe" (i.e. beyond the movies). In fact, the idea of Coruscant, the galactic capital city/planet, reportedly originated from Timothy Zahn's novel "Heir to the Empire".

The last book I read

"The Oil Age is Over", a virtual book by Matt Savinar. He offered it for free download during the Nov 2004 U.S. election period. Yup, that's the last book I actually sat down and read, and it's a virtual PDF book, at that. The Internet has in the meantime filled in the rest of my information needs.

Five books that mean a lot to me

1. The Robotech Series

Not a single book, but a series. As you might have noticed, it's a recurring theme here. The kind of galaxy-spanning scope that I prefer for my sci-fi reading usually takes more than a single book to encompass. Robotech was the one that got me actually into the reading habit, back in secondary school when I found Volume 1 in the Chinese High library. That was way back in 1986. Not too bad when the fictional universe comes with its own TV series, toys and model kits. This is the one which made me sit down and actually look for the dictionary for the difficult words (at the time), and context-guess the rest. Two things actually, 1. made me read, 2. introduced me to sci-fi literature.

2. The Warstrider Series

By William Keith. A Battletech-like series with human-piloted mechs (giant combat robots). Not so well-known, and out of print now anyway, but it had a good depiction of what a Type 3 Civilization might look like. Not as famous as Vernor Vinge's books, but not too bad, all in all. Important ideas included the evolution of races from Type 2 to Type 3, an instantaneous galactic Internet, and harnessing the power of dual singularities (black holes).

3. The Foundation Series

By Isaac Asimov. The movie "I, Robot" only skimmed the surface of Asimov's works. The rest of it can be found in the Foundation Series, and in the other "Robot" books. Important ideas - the Three Laws of Robotics, as well as the Zeroth Law. Trantor, which predated Star Wars' Coruscant. The idea that human behaviour may be predictable, or modeled, in the large, but not on an individual level.

4. The Party's Over

At last, a single book. One of the most important books that I've ever read, though at the time I already had a good idea and grasp of Peak Oil and its consequences. Richard Heinberg puts it together nicely and explains the situation very clearly. Some people have called it "dark", but I wouldn't call it that. I would call it - realistic.

5. Guide to VGA Programming (?)

I can't remember the exact title, nor the author. But this was the one, that back in 1990, which was 15 years ago, secured my entry to geekdom, so to speak. From here, I learned how to program the VGA video card's port registers, access screen memory directly, and "refresh during vertical blanking", among other things. From here, I also picked up the details needed to write my own PCX graphics file reader routine, and move text around on the screen a thousand times faster than through the cumbersome OS/BIOS calls generally provided.

Five more people to tag :

1. Akikonomu
2. Doug Pardee (Creative Karma)
3. FatherOf4
4. Gwunwai/Jas
5. Mats Henricson

(2005-06-07 13:33:24 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [3]

Comments:

Hmm... what are the questions of the book meme? Those 4 questions?

Posted by Wai on June 07, 2005 at 09:26 PM SGT #

Yup.

Posted by lowem on June 07, 2005 at 09:32 PM SGT #

i should get all grrrr about the "chunk of children's books" bit on behalf of my friend biow, but truth be told, i found that rather funny...shhhhhh.

did you ever get into warhammer by TSR? it's a rpg game. my brother tried to get me to play that when he got tired of being dungeon master, but i didn't (and still don't) like robots.

Posted by spot on June 08, 2005 at 11:19 AM SGT #