Books
I suppose it was inevitable that I would end up writing answers to book questions here at some time or another.

How many books do I own?

No, I'm not going to count them. Since we just moved, my wife was happy to remind me she thinks I buy too many books. There are eight full bookshelves in our apartment now.

But that doesn't count spoken word files (almost 200) I have on my computer, including This American Life episodes (last week was quite interesting), books from audible, and CDs from the library.

What's the last book I bought?

In paper -- Parini's bio of Faulkner and Faulkner's Light in August. They also are my current reading.

From audible, Assassination Vacation.

What's the last book I read?
Ones I finished recently include Al Capone Does My Shirts, Holes, The Twenty-One Balloons. All highly recommended.

What are the five books that mean the most to me?

Is this a trick question?

Books that I've read more than once or keep returning to include:

The Adventures of Augies March, Lonesome Dove, Singer's Collected Stories, The Thurber Carnival, Jeff Smith's cookbooks, Roger Ebert's Great Movies, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ways with Words, Jihad vs. McWorld (and the original article in The Atlantic Monthly), Lombardo's translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, (check this page for good study guides) and, finally for idea challenged readers, John Kirby's The Comparative Reader.

In the latter book, there's a nice chapter that comments on the "canon controversy", for lack of a better term. He quotes someone (the book's in a box now, so I couldn't check the name) who points out that lists of classics of great books do not present a list of all the books one needs to read to be qualified or sufficiently educated in the humanities; rather, they offer starting points for people putting together a lifetime reading plan. Kirby's book is a great resource for people looking for lists of classics and great books, of a wide variety of sorts.