Got Tagged...

Whoah... Just got tagged by Rebekah :) And if you wanna know who gets it next, scroll down to the foot of this post... :D

THE QUESTION: Imagine that a local philanthropist is hosting an event for local high school students and has asked you to pick out five to ten books to hand out as door prizes. At least one book should be funny and at least one book should provide some history of Western Civilization and at least one book should have some regional connection. The philanthropist doesn't like foul language (but will allow some four-letter words in context, such as expressed during battle by soldiers). Otherwise things are pretty wide open. What do you pick?

OK, here goes...

FUNNY: It just has to be Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stared at Goats... seriously. No, I mean, funnily... The book focuses on a US military Special Ops unit formed back in the 1970s and details their special (attempted/alleged) abilities of being able to kill goats by staring at them and leading on to the modern day practices of torturing non-combatant prisoners (think Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay...) the theme tune to Barney - yes, the purple dinosaur, no less :S

It makes you wonder if "choking on a pretzel" is part of some new assassination technique...

HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILISATION: Now this may be a bit of a bizarre and tenuous choice, but bear with me on this... it's Brian Bates' The Way of Wyrd - It's a fiction based on historical texts and is a snapshot of pre-Christian British culture. So it's our forgotten Anglo Saxon heritage as purged from the minds of ancient British people by the "emissaries of God" sent here to document our ways and find paths to the goal of our ancestors' ultimate conversion...

It reminds us that the west once had it's own philosophy of balance, similar to that of the eastern yin-yang in our fire & ice, sun & moon polarities...

REGIONAL CONNECTION: OK, this is a toughie... OK, first thing that comes to mind... Stephen King's The Tommyknockers... now I'm not a King fan and I only ever read Misery, which was actually quite good... but the reason for my choice is this...

When I was at college a friend read The Tommyknockers and pointed out a line that read something like "the sleepy Hampshire town of Fleet" which was, at the time, where I lived - it's just 3 miles away from Farnborough. As kids we used to go past this creepy old house with leaded windows and a rumoured chequer-board style hallway and grand sweeping staircase. And that's apparently where Mr. King stayed when he once lived in England for a year... so there you go!

BOOK FOUR: Has to be Julian May's first installment in the Saga of the Exiles... The Many Coloured Land. I read it when I was just 10 years old and it's an extremely intelligent sci-fi/fantasy novel with brilliant historical, geographical and philosophical values interwoven into its lavish literal tapestry; a flag-waving standard for female writers and the first of a series of a most fascinating story about travellers back in time to an age where man was starting to rule the earth... with some very interesting twists...

BOOK FIVE: OK, so I'm neither classically trained nor educated in nuffink but the school of hard knocks, so this may come as a surprise... but the fifth book is Robert D Kaplan's Warrior Politics, suitably sub-titled "Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos". It's a fascinating skim through history, politics and the ideals of leadership and is an utterly thought-provoking little tome, whether one agrees with it's content and direction or not... This literary gem also doubles up as being the back-up vehicle for the history of western civilisation role.

WHO'S NEXT?: OK, so Lever goes off and tags, and is looking forward to some great responses from these beautiful people...

• My girl BBFK
• Brom-man
• Johnny Crash