topaz

This one amuses me, somehow:

EDIT: for the purposes of this meme I am defining "no one on your friends list" as excluding your spouse and life partner. This is of course a restriction that no sensible person would question, since if you and your partner enjoy co-ownership of most of your worldly possessions, it moots the whole meme. Anyone who disagrees with this should be prepared to defend their honor on the naked jello wrestling field.

A book you own that no one on your friends list does: probably Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon by Jim Paul. The author describes how an idle daydream turns into an enormously involved plan to build a medieval catapult with a friend, for the sole purpose of hurling rocks into the San Francisco bay. The narrative alternates a journal of their plans to design and construct the thing with chapters about the history and evolution of modern warfare, and takes turns into the thorny relationship between the author and his friend, and into a memoir of his childhood. There are relatively few books that can make me laugh uncontrollably and bring me to tears at different points. This is one.

[ EDIT: At least two other people on my friendslist have this book. Well done! As runner-up I submit Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, which I read in high school -- a weird, lyrical, intense fantasy about New York City over the length of the twentieth century. It was a bestselling book in the day but doesn't seem to have stood the test of time, and I've met few other people who read it. ]

A CD you own that no one on your friends list does: This is harder since many of my friends actually have stranger taste in music than I do. But I am reasonably sure that no one on my friends list owns a copy of Diamonds in the Rough: 25 Years With the Men of the Deeps, a CD of traditional songs sung by a Nova Scotia coal miner's choir. Top that!

A DVD/VHS tape you own that no one on your friends list does: Here I might have an edge. Even though most of the stuff I own is terribly conventional, I can't imagine that anyone else owns a copy of Manny & Lo. This might have renewed interest for some people now, by virtue of starring a very young Scarlett Johansson before anybody had heard of her.

I was going to say that I am probably also one of the only people in the world who would like to own a copy of The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Girls in Love on DVD, until I checked and discovered that the DVD actually has been released! Woot!

A place you've been that no one on your friends list has been: This one is harder: Having