Well, now that I’ve got some time, George, I’ll play along, too:

1. One book that changed my life: The Ultimate Resource 2, by Julian Simon. It made tangible the life-affirming optimism of free-market principles and the value of individuals. It also skewered with a smile one leftist sacred cow after another after another.

2. One book I’ve read more than once: Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn: John Donne’s Satyres, by M. Thomas Hester. This could also have gone under “changed my life,” except that it really serves to reinforce the life-changing perspective already received from Prof. Hester’s Donne course at NC State.

3. One book I’d want on a desert island: The Bible.

4. One book that made me laugh: Would that Leef hadn’t already mentioned God Is My Broker. Therefore I’ll go with Christopher Buckley’s essay compilation, Wry Martinis. The Lenin’s body hoax and the tiff with Tom Clancy are particularly magnificent.

5. One book that made me cry: First reaction, Pshaw! then, Wait… Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume Two; Part Four: “The Soul and Barbed Wire,” Chapter One: “The Ascent”; the last words of Dr. Boris Nikolayevich Kornfeld, former prison stoolie and hunted man, telling Solzhenitsyn in the prison hospital ward about his conversion to Christianity and the shocking reality of true justice, prior to his murder in his sleep mere hours later. The impact of that part of Gulag, in the context of “The Ascent” and how it is, mere pages later, that Solzhenitsyn could say Bless you, prison, for having been in my life! ? to me it is comparable to Hamlet’s “The readiness is all,” but in full import infinitely more devastating and powerful, given its unfathomably true circumstance.

6. One book I wish had been written: No Means No: The First Amendment Really Does Protect Religious and Political Speech, No Matter What Judicial Shenanigans Some Candyass Statists Try to Pull, by the American Bar Association, the Federalist Society and the American Civil Liberties Union.

7. One book I wish had not been written: All the “good” ones are taken, so let me go with The Mill on the Floss, by Georg Eliot. It was a required text in an eighteenth-century novels course taught by a feminist, and it was a course I had na?vely signed up for hoping for a few good books to read, not an agenda. Ironically, this was one of the few “classics” required in the course, but I think that was because the female protagonist cried, it seemed, every three pages. That of course fit in well with the course’s presumption that everything conspired to create female unhappiness then as now. I’m sure the reading experience was soured by the extra-literary gripes of my professor; nevertheless, I wanted that damned mill to burn up before I had completed the first 100 pages, a wish that only grew more fervent as the pages sloshed by with still more blubbering.

8. One book I am currently reading: Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, by Solomon Volkov. It’s the book that shattered a carefully honed Soviet illusion that had been bought into by countless Western socialist elites who should have known better, and a brilliant artist’s revenge and salvaging his life’s work and reputation from the one place the Soviets couldn’t touch him ? beyond the grave.

9. One book I’ve been meaning to read: John Adams by David McCullough. I read a speech by him to Hillsdale College on the subject of Adams, “A Man Worth Knowing,” and bought the book immediately afterward. It’s now in “the stack.”

Now that I have done, I have not done, for I have more … that is, I have some “tags” to make. So let’s go with Bob Lee Swagger, Kevin “Southpaw Grammar” Hales, Mike Adams, Hal Young, and Jerry “Bigtime” Agar.