This weekend I entered my entire library into librarything. Why would I do this? I don’t really know, but I’ve always been curious how many books I own. The number, as of today, appears to be 858 (including seven duplicates.) For those wishing to see what trash I read, you can find the catelog at this page.
O brave new quantum world!
Damn you. Beat me by ~100. Our overlap, while large, isn’t quite as large as I’d expect. It amazes me (and makes me want to go to a bookstore!) that even two people with ostensibly very similar tastes will only have a 10% overlap.
I think the 100 more I own may all be Borges and poker books!
I hope the seven duplicates are all of one single title; maybe Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?
Do you play poker? Do tell. You haven’t blogged about that to my memory…
What a wonderful thing is librarything – another instance of word-of-mouth “ex machina.”
Let me return the favor of your implicit recommendations with a few suggestions. Of course you may have read these but don’t own them, or you may have intended to read them but not have had the time (imagine that).
Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” – Another tour de force in the vein of “V” and “Gravity’s Rainbow.” It’s more warm-hearted than “Rainbow,” and hey, Mark Knopfler wrote a song about it (“Sailing to Philadelphia”).
Alan Lightman’s “Origins” – Kicked my interest in cosmology and associated physics into a higher gear.
David Quammen’s “Song of the Dodo” – Beautifully written, carefully researched book about how we’re slicing/squeezing the “wild” into smaller spaces, and the consequences thereof.
Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “A Canticle for Liebowitz” – Sci-fi classic, ‘big concept’ along the lines of Clarke or Asimov, but a lot funnier than anything I can remember by either of them.
Hey Jud, thanks for the recommendations. I’ve been putting off reading “Mason & Dixon” because there is so few Pynchon that I feel I need to spread it out over my life. I’ve decided that the next peice of “literature” I’m going to read is “Blood Meridian”. I’ll keep my eyes out for “Dodo” and “Liebowitz”! Good thing summer is here!
I hate to admit that I have not read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Yeah, my gaps are huge.
I’ll be in Vegas in a few weekends, so I’ll be sure to post a poker story when I play there.
Re “Fear and Loathing…:” You may remember sometime back when I quoted the opening words of “Gravity’s Rainbow” – “A screaming comes across the sky….” F&L has a rather memorable opening as well:
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….’ And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ‘Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'”
🙂
Blood Meridian is amazing. I’m ashamed I hadn’t read McCarthy until a year ago.
I second M&D. It’s lovely.