"Ji, Meme-Sahib"

That's what we say when star bloggers tag us, even though we hate chain mail.

Also because we're kinda inclined to forgive book-related chain mail.

And also because we're going to stay with the Babu for a few weeks, and the Babu's going to feed us, and we like being fed.

Anyway.

Here's the Book tag meme

(We're just filling these in roughly now, so we can get this hot potato outa our mitts).

Total Number of Books I Own
Um. Lots. A fraction of Nilanjana and DD's stockpile, and we don't have ancestral homes full of books like Annie (the Zig ancestral place did have piles of books, but they were sold for scrap after Granny died. Argh.), but lots.

Last Book I Bought:
Several in one fell swoop. It's the only shopping we do where we go a little mad. We go out to buy just one book, just one, focussed, we-will-not-go-wild-again. And we come out a few hours later with glazed expression and carry bags digging deep into the tender flesh of our artistic hands. Right, where were we? Yes. The Bill Bryson thingy. A trio of Jasper Ffordes. A couple of Pratchetts. Telling Tales. Elsewhere. Stephen King's On Writing for a certain talented young writer we know. And around the same time, a signed copy of pal Anjan Ray's Just Beyond, at his launch. And a few days later, back in Bombay (all the above were picked up in Delhi's Khan Market, except Anjan's book), at the Kalaghoda Fair, three faux-leather-bound classics, Frankenstein, Three Men in a Boat, and Time Machine and The War of the Worlds in one volume. Oh yes - we didn't buy these, but we're slipping all our acquisitions in so we can look all learned like - while in Delhi, Manjula Padmanabhan gave us a fresh-minted, signed copy of her This is Suki!, and Nilanjana gave us a signed copy of her A Matter of Taste. She then borrowed it back for a magazine to shoot the cover, and hasn't returned it, which explains why we're going back to Delhi in the middle of summer.

Last Book I Read:
Short History... accompanies us as we speak. The Archie and Mehitabel Omnibus lies beside our sleeping mat. A volume of world poetry translated into English is dipped into whenever we're feeling particularly nasty about ourselves and when we want to tell ourselves that we should be attempting to write, dammit. Elsewhere, Telling Tales and Just Beyond are also being read bit by bit. And we're going to leave all that behind because we're going to Nilanjana and DD's bookshelves for the next few weeks. Er, we meant to say their home.

Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:
To Kill a Mockingbird If we ever get be a dad, we want to be like Atticus.
H2G2. All of 'em. Even though DNA broke our heart by showing us that there was such a thing as funny SF&F, and we wouldn't be able to corner the market by inventing a new genre.
Anything by Wodehouse. When we can write one-third as well, we'll be a great writer.
Elements of Style
The Readers' Digest Encyclopaedia, Volume Three Favourite reading since we were first told to "go look it up." We haven't stopped since.
And all the books we're reading at the moment. We're impressionable.

Tag Five People And Ask Them To Do This On Their Blogs:
We weren't going to do this bit, as our form of protest against being tagged, killing this strain of the wild gene meme right here. But then we thought, what the hell. Let's tag all of Caferati's collaborators. And why stop at that? There's almost a thousand members on Caferati's message board. We hereby tag them too.

Hah.

Top that.

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