I’ve been tagged by Kitty!

Total number of books I’ve owned:

Are you serious? Wow. Thousands?

The last book I bought:

At midnight-1am last night I bought Morgan Hawke’s Victorious Star. Behold the beauty of ebooks. Instant gratification. *g*

The last book I read:

The most recent book I finished was The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout : An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia by Arcadius Kahan. But since y’all know I’m a fetish-ridden, crack-addicted mental masturbator (*g*) at heart, the most recent romance I finished was Magnolia Summer by Jaci Burton, which was awesome! And I’m currently reading Jinxed by Beth Ciotta, which is a wicked fun book!

5 books that mean a lot to me:

Oh, this meme is killing me.

1—The Little House on the Prairie books. I doubt there are many people reading this to whom I’d have to explain this choice. They live in my heart, just like family.

2—The Polar Express. Long before it was a movie starring Tom Hanks, Tom Hanks and Tom Hanks, my family has loved this book and its message. My little train-happy boys climb up in the lap of their train-happy daddy to hear this story every Christmas Eve.

3—Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by Anne Lamott. The honesty of this journal of her son’s first year is amazing. It chronicles not only the happy and joyous moments, but those scary split-seconds when you just want the baby to go away and leave you alone. I truly believe that if every new mom, and her family, read this book and shared a more open dialogue about the bizarre expectations that a woman becomes Saint Mommy at the moment she gives birth, there would be fewer cases of good moms “snapping” and doing bad things.

4—The Calder series by Janet Dailey. Despite the issues the author faced, the Calder family joins the Ingalls family in my heart. These were the first romances I remember sneaking under the covers with a flashlight. Chase Benteen Calder was the first hero to jump off the page and make my young heart go pitty-patter.

5—How to Write a Romance and Get It Published by Kathryn Falk. I have my tattered copy right here. 1989. As outdated and obsolete as an Apple IIe. And yet this book will never be far from my desk. I bought this book in 1990, as a graduation gift for myself, and it sustained me for years. It was my only resource for a long, long time. And while I finally got internet access—in 2000, because we’re always behind—and realized the book was horribly outdated and no longer useful to me, I will keep it forever. For ten years this book and I worked together, toward my dream. Sure, the market info and such went by the wayside, but it was more inspirational then educational. It was a constant and faithful reminder of where I wanted to go.

Now I’ve got shiny new copies of Maass and Vogler and Seger and more on my desk shelf. I have an editor! Soon I’ll have a book. And there’s no doubt that its largely due to the education I’ve received online in the past 4-5 years, and the support I’ve received from my friends. But I know in my heart that without this little pink paperback with the pages cracked and falling out, I wouldn’t have had the fuel to keep that little fire of hope burning during the decade I had nobody but myself.

Dammit, I’m crying now. Yeah, this book means something to me.