She always ran faster than me when we were kids, so I guess it's appropriate that Adina tagged me with the book meme.

Number of books I own:
Oh, hundreds and hundreds I guess. My incredibly patient mother is currently living with about 10 huge boxes crowding her Toronto apartment - these are the books I left behind in New York, five years ago; since I still haven't found the money to have them shipped to Israel, they ended up in Toronto. I miss my books.
My Tel Aviv apartment is sadly lacking in shelf space, so the books I've accumulated since moving here are mostly stacked on the floor. Sometimes I trip on them when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Reading style:
Mostly lying on my bed. Also, I almost never leave the house without a book - even if I'm just going to run errands; being book-less makes me feel vulnerable.

Last book I bought:
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, by Niall Ferguson
I discovered Ferguson when his history of the Rothschild family received an impressive review in the New York Times. This story of how Britain came to rule most of the world is anecdotal, informative and generally a good read.

Last book I read:
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Contemporary Afghanistan - before and after the Soviet invasion - provides an exotic setting, and the plot is pretty gripping, but basically this bestselling novel is brain candy. Take it to the beach - you'll finish it in a day.

Book(s) I am reading now:
"Empire" (see above)
Our Weddings, by Dorit Rabinyan (prep work for an interview with the author)
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham (present from Adina - it's winning the battle for my full attention).

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Only five, huh?

The Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott
Okay, I'm cheating: The Raj Quartet is actually four novels - "The Jewel in the Crown", "The Towers of Silence", "The Day of the Scorpion" and "A Division of the Spoils".
The plot takes place in India, between 1942 and 1947, when India gained independence. As far as I'm concerned, The Raj Quartet ranks among the best literature of the twentieth century. Scott dissects every aspect of life - love, violence, power, class, racism, intimacy - using the metaphor of the rape of a British woman by Indian men in colonial India. Yes, I know it sounds like E.M. Forster - but Scott paints a much deeper and wider picture.

The Brothers Ashkenazi, by I.J. Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer often said that his older brother, Israel Joshua, who died of natural causes when he was still in his forties, was a better writer than he. For awhile, I thought he was right; now I just think they're different. "The Brothers Ashkenazi " is often compared to Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks": both have thick, multi-layered plots that follow a family for several generations, against the backdrop of major upheavals in history. Singer's novel is set in Lodz, from the mid-late nineteenth century until the 1930s.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
I discovered this story about a young, impoverished girl growing up in Brooklyn just before World War One when I was 11. It was the first book that made me cry.

My Darling Villain, by Lynne Reid Banks
So I'd just hit puberty, and I discovered this great contemporary novel about a 15 year-old girl from a middle-class London family who falls in love with a motorcycle-riding working class boy to whom her parents object. Meanwhile, she has for years been nursing a crush on the handsome older brother of her friend and next-door neighbour Rebecca. Suddenly, the older brother decides that he is interested in his kid sister's friend after all. Who will the protagonist choose? I was enthralled by the description of her first kiss; it made me want to get my braces removed, fast.

A Simple Story, by S.Y. Agnon
It's not an easy read in Hebrew, even for native speakers, but the English translation is excellent. Shmuel Yosef Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960; is most famous for his epic "Only Yesterday" (Tmol Shilshom), but I like "A Simple Story" best.
After her mother's death, Blume Nacht take a job as a servant for her wealthy cousins, who live in the fictional Austro-Hungarian town of Szybusz. When her cousins' only son, Hirshl, falls in love with Blume, mother Tsirl takes Machiavellian action and marries him off to a girl from a family of proper social and economic standing. Hirshl eventually goes mad, is institutionalized, cured by talk therapy and ultimately surrenders to his petit-bourgeois fate. Agnon paints a brilliant portrait of Jewish life in pre-World War One Austria-Hungary, and his psychological insights are way ahead of his time.

Next to be tagged:
Noorster; Allison; my brilliant friend in Tokyo; Karen (even though she won't be back from Europe for a couple of weeks); and Ashley.