Tag! I'm It!

I've been tagged by The Atheist Mama on the book meme. Pretty appropriate for me, actually.

A book that changed my life
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Although I eventually outgrew Objectivism, I still love Ayn Rand's work.

A book I’ve read more than once
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

A book I would take with me if I were stuck on a desert island
Thich Nhat Hanh's The Miracle of Mindfulness

A book that made me laugh
Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sheer genius.

A book that made me cry
Flowers for Algernon--a book I read in high school about a man with a mental disability written from his perspective. He undergoes intelligence enhancing, like the experimental lab mouse Algernon, and throughout the book goes from improvement to being worse off than before he started treatment, and the writing is just brilliant. As he starts to fall backward into mental incompetence, I was completely in tears.

A book that I wish had been written
A book of Appalachian stories written from a modern day perspective. Any stories about my region of the world inevitably tend to be mythic, set back in the "good old days". Nobody wants to touch the way things are now. Although, if you want anything done, sometimes you have to do it yourself... ;)

A book that I wish had never been written
I tend to think that all books have merit, even if they're evil (Mein Kampf comes to mind). There's something to learn from the making of them, if nothing else.

A book I’ve been meaning to read
This list is really too long to go into. In my field, you can never read enough. There's always one more work to go over or one more voice in the field. I guess if I think of it from a pleasure perspective, I've still got D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers that I haven't had the time to crack the cover on, but always mean to.

I’m currently reading
Well, there are books for every aspect of my life, I guess.
Society Must Be Defended by Foucault
A book on the pedagogy of teaching
50/50 Management for my work at the nonprofit
A shockingly thick spiral bound study on the current trends in illiteracy
The Mitford Sisters, a biography that I'm finding fascinating but just can't seem to find time for

Blogs I’m tagging:
I'm tagging Barbie, just because I know she'll have something uttlerly brilliant to say about it.
I'm tagging Audrey, because I like her mind and what she puts in it.
I'm tagging Jo because I absolutely love her, and whatever she reads must be a hoot.
I'm tagging Kari because she just got finished with college and now has time to read whatever she wants to instead of what she has to.
Finally, I'm going to tag Sandra. I'd love to know what she reads.