A few days back, Afarensis tagged me with the Book Meme that started with Ben Meyers at Faith and Theology. In turn, I tagged Coturnix, Salto Sobrius, Unintelligent Design, Amused Muse, and Defending Science. The last two didn’t pick up on my meme, though. I read at Amused Muse but have never posted and Silkworm doesn’t stray far from his core topic.
Still, the meme was a fun exercise and it was fun reading what others posted up and down the meme lines. I finally got tagged again by Brad at HUNBlog, so I thought I’d post the meme lines to show the evolution of the book meme for our two blogs. It would seem that our common ancestor is Abnormal Interests.
Man, wouldn’t it be fun if someone took the time to come up with a complete phylogeny of the book meme?
The Hot Cup of Joe meme line, from me to Ben Meyers is:
Hot Cup of Joe <== Afarensis <== Abnormal Interests <== Thoughts on Antiquity <== The Dilettante Exegete <== Resurrection Dogmatics <== Faith and Theology
The HUNBlog meme line, to Ben Meyers is:
HUNBlog <== Radioactive Banana <== Dr. Shellie <== The Clutter Museum <== Ethics and Science <== Abnormal Interests <== Thoughts on Antiquity <== The Dilettante Exegete <== Resurrection Dogmatics <== Faith and Theology
Hot Cup of Joe 
Cool!
H’mm, I wonder what the inbreeding coefficient is on that line of descent?
Did you see this earlier? I feel proud to be such an ancestor of everyone. 🙂
Chris
What is this meme thing? I totally don’t know what it is.
I’m planning another blog that will be more varied in content but higher in quality, so maybe then if the specialization is an issue for whatever this is.
The Book Meme was an idea intended to be passed on from blogger to blogger on the topic of books. See the links above to see either my own answers or those of other bloggers.
Basically, it was passed from blogger to blogger by simply “tagging” them in your own blog. I found out by looking at afarensis’ blog by clicking on my sitemeter stats, though I would have noticed it anyway, since I visit all the blogs on my list to the right on average once/twice a day.
Liz here from I Speak of Dreams. This meme was particularly interesting in that the progenitor was easily found at Faith and Theology–posted July 26 2006.
There are two problem with the model of common ancestry: (a) some people picked it up without being directly tagged (that would be me), and evidently some people saw the meme several times before responding.
I saw it first on August 2, and posted the questions, but I didn’t get around to answering it until August 4.
The meme escaped pretty quickly from the theology-oriented blogs, but seemed to spread in themed communities (from theology to teaching to ….)
I think I came over to your blog from….shoot now I have forgotten.
Liz again. I forgot to say that on the rare occasions I play with memes, I like to look around to see who else is playing, and often put the link results together with my response.
All in all, the blog memes like this are fun. There’s all sorts of things that can be done with the data, like tally lists of answers like “which book changed your life?”, “which book do you wish had never been written?”, etc.
I’ve clicked through and read several of the different responses (including yours) and I have to say that the book meme’s most interesting aspect for me was making me think more about the books I’ve read, would like to read, and that others have/are read/reading.